We're pleased to announce the immediate release of the much anticipated Simple Image Gallery PRO v2.

This major release is a free upgrade to all existing customers of Simple Image Gallery PRO.

If you've already bought a license, you may login to PDS and grab you copy now:
www.joomlaworks.net/component/option,com_jwpds/Itemid,38/



WHAT'S NEW IN V2?
- First of all: Improved performance in the thumbnail generation and caching engine. Generated thumbnails are now created faster and stored in Joomla's "cache" folder. If Joomla! is operating fine in your site, you will not face any weird permission issues again (usually spotted on crappy hosts).

- 10 popup engines (!) for ultimate style and compatibility with various frameworks. Includes 2 engines supporting "slideshow" mode and our brand new popup engine SimpleBox (soon to be released as standalone). Proper checks will make sure that Mootools is not loaded multiple times in Joomla! 1.5. Popup engines utilizing jQuery will download the latest library version minified from the new "Google AJAX Libraries API" service, which means faster load times for your website and your gallery.

- 4 templates (2 brand new) to showcase your galleries. Better still, it's easy to create your own now. Just copy one of the existing template folders, rename it, change the CSS and the plugin parameters will see the new folder created. So you can easily select and use your new template!

- Labels (captions) are extended to include title and description. If you enable lables in the plugin parameters, the labels.txt file is auto-generated for you to make the process of publishing your image galleries faster than ever before! You can now use full HTML code inside the label descriptions. Backwards compatibility has also been kept, so your previous galleries will work smoothly.

- My personal favorite: Select to "fit" or "zoom" thumbnail images to the available thumb dimensions, regardless of image size. The first option will "shrink" images no matter what dimensions they got to "fit" the thumbnail dimensions. The second one will "zoom" a portion of the thumbnail so you can have a gallery of images with varying dimensions displaying as if they were resized in a professional program like Photoshop. That means either tall or wide, your images will be displayed in the dimensions you specify for your thumbnails.
See a demo of this feature here: www.joomlaworks.net/content/view/45/34/

- You can select to show or hide a download link for the original image in the lightbox-like popup

- Large images can be resized in the popup, when their dimensions exceed the ones of the browser window (see PrettyPhoto, SimpleBox etc.)

- You can choose to load a module position in the popup window, for banners or other cool integrations!

- New extended syntax for more flexibility: use for example {gallery}mygallery:200:140:0:2{/gallery} to instruct SIG Pro to:
a) fetch the images inside the "mygallery" folder
b) resize them to 200px width and 140px height
c) display the gallery in normal mode (not in single thumbnail mode)
d) create and use labels.txt file inside the "mygallery" folder, ready for you to edit

- Simple debug mode to help us provide better support. This feature will steadily be part on all our extensions, either free or commercial.



WHAT NEXT?
v2 includes more enhancements in the background which will enable us to make it the best gallery extension for Joomla! by far with the addition of: subtemplating for your galleries and a component to quickly create, organize and insert them inside your Joomla! articles.

More about these features in coming blog posts at the JoomlaWorks blog.