The developers of Gallery, an online photo-album organizer, have officially announced the start of Gallery 3.  I have to say they have a very aggressive release date for the release of version 3.0.

Those of you that have been paying attention know that something is going on! At the Gallery Sprint a few weeks ago, we made a lot of decisions and got the ball rolling on a complete rewrite which we've decided to call Gallery 3. Development of new features on Gallery 2 has been frozen, Gallery 1 is now a completely separate project "Jallery", and the Gallery team is now busy at work on Gallery 3. It's definitely not ready to run on your website yet but we've set the ambitious goal of having a 3.0 release by February 1, 2009 and are on track to meet that goal.

Feature requirements for Gallery 3.0 can be found on the Gallery wiki page.

Gallery 2.3, an open source "photo album organizer", has been released. Lot of new features in this version of the Gallery 2.x branch.  Some of the new features and enchancements include:

• Slideshow module now uses PicLens to provide a rich, full screen slideshow.
• Comment module now offers spam moderation and Akismet support.
• New email notification module allowing users to configure events they wish to get notified for.
• Support for SQLite 3.x as a database backend.
• New SnapGalaxy module for prints from snapgalaxy.com.
• New Jpegtran module to support rotation and cropping of jpeg images.
• New database backup features.
• Themes can now override module template files.
• Performance and stability improvements.
• User interface improvements.
• Security improvements resulting from internal and external audits.

First, there was HOT or NOT where you could rate the pictures of men and women. A great site to visit if you're single and don't have a date on a lonely Friday night. But life changes and now you have a family. Do what do you do if you're married with nothing to do on a Saturday night?

Yes, you can always watch Curious George with the family, but how do you get back to your old life in a responsible manner? Well, now you have an alternative, Web Hot or Not?

David Sifry (Technorati) explains how webhotornot.com came to exist.

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky
late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and
rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows,
perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site
- sort of a "prediction market" for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we'd do an homage.

"In January of this year we set up a separate forum category for 3rd party modules and themes, in July we added a Gallery 2 Demo Sites showcase, and the list on the user contributions page on the Codex (our official documentation site) has been steadly growing since it went live over a year ago. Gallery just wouldn't be what it is without the hard work of users just like you. Thanks! Related to your hard work, we have some fun things up our sleeves for you to look forward to in the next couple of months: your plugins and themes downloadable from inside of Gallery 2.2, a theme competition, and maybe a surprise or two :).

The most recent contribution we would like to highlight is Joe7's Gallery Theme Demo. It's a very neat site that let's you apply various Gallery 2 Themes, Image Frames, and Color Packs to one Gallery install to see how they might look on your site before downloading them. Thanks Joe7!"

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