CB Gallery 3.0 has officially arrived! It has been a long time coming, but the multi-media gallery you know and love has been completely rewritten from the ground up bringing substantial performance improvements and exceptional new features. Lets get into it below!
No more large amounts of page reloads as CB Gallery moves into the future with complete inline navigation. So navigating albums, pages, searching, etc.. will no longer take users out of their profiles, groups, and more. Accessibility implemented around every corner with semantic URLs to reinforce the inline navigation.
I will preface that because this is a major release following our Joomla 3.0 discontinuation plans Joomla 3.0 is no longer supported in this release of CB Gallery. The minimum supported Joomla version for CB Gallery 3.0 is Joomla 4.0.
Note this is a rather substantial migration. I've painstakingly went through every parameter to try and ensure a smooth migration experience, but as always it's not possible to cover all use cases. It is recommended to install CB Gallery 3.0. Followed by CB Activity 6.2.0. Then lastly CB Auto Actions 9.4.0. This will ensure the smoothest migration. Please be sure to review your gallery settings carefully after updating.
Ok, lets take a look at how CB Gallery will look and feel. I'll go through each of the new templates, yup that's right there's multiple templates available on day 1, so you can get an idea of what to expect.
Default Template
The default template is your standard block grid. This can be entirely customized with a CSS variable making it easy to change the grid size with 1-3 lines of CSS.
Cards Template
The cards template is heavily inspired by Instagram giving a nice infinite scrolling feel. Inline likes, modal commenting, and inline sharing integrated nicely from CB Activity provide a fully interactive gallery feed at your disposal. Includes scrolling autoplay of video and audio media as well.
Panels Template
The panels template was heavily inspired by YouTube sporting a familiar layout of elements with yet again an easily customized grid. Supports autoplay of video and audio media on hover just like YouTube thumbnail previews!
Table Layout
Just want a simple file manager? No problem! The Table layout is designed exactly for that. Provides a simple straight forward template for all media.
Masonry Template
This one was certainly a tricky one, but it's a JavaScript-free masonry layout for media. The idea is to maintain aspect ratios as it arranges media across columns.
That's it for the included templates. We'd be happy to consider more for future releases if you have some ideas! Changing templates is as simple as selecting one from a dropdown for your gallery and that's it.
Lets get into the new Albums design. It still utilizes a header, but has been cleaned up a bit and made more social. Albums are also entirely inline navigated now instead of loading a separate page.
All media is then viewed within a beautiful modal window. This modal window design has also been expanded to CB Activity to allow for a consistent look and feel of all media.
All your galleries can now be managed for a single convenient location. You no longer have to look all over the place for parameters. Simply go to the Galleries management page and that's it!
There's a lot more to say, but I felt keeping this a bit shorter would be nice for a change. If you want to see even more details about what has been implemented please read through the Beta blog posts below!
CB Gallery 3.0.0 Beta 1 Released
CB Gallery 3.0.0 Beta 2 Released
For a full change long of what has been implemented please visit our forge. For those that want to give CB Gallery 3.0 a try please wait roughly 1 day and I'll have our demo site completely up to date and ready to explore (thank you for your patience!).
Thank you everyone for your patience during this long development cycle, but I hope here at Joomlapolis we can help you build even more amazing communities and sites.