We have a new release of our Imgen component, our image generator for Joomla. The latest release is version 1.1.0.

This component for Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 allows you to dynamically resize and compress your site images. It includes a plugin framework, and is available with plugins to add a watermark, and to apply dynamic resizing to all your article images, and to restrict image viewing to particular user groups. The component can cache the resized images, and also allows you to encode the image path, which is useful if you want to hide the location of your original image files.

Version 1.1.0

The new release includes features to improve usability. It deals with a problem with displaying images with spaces in the file name, and can avoid problems with caching caused by image name duplication which affected the previous version.

There are also new releases of the watermark plugin (version 1.1.0), and the image resizer (1.0.3). The new release of the watermark plugin includes more options for positioning the watermark, while the new image resizer allows resizing to be turned off for particular Joomla layouts. For example you can now have blog article images resized, but have the original article image left untouched.

There is also a new plugin, ImageRestrict, which allows you to restrict the view of images on your site to your chosen user groups.

Updating

You can update simply by uploading and installing the component and plugins using the Joomla installer, there is no need to uninstall the old version. It is worth considering if you need to. The changes between versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the compponent are not huge, and are designed to deal with specific problems of usability that became apparent with the old version. If you have the previous version working successfully on your site you do not necessarily need to update.

If you do decide to update the component you should update the plugins too, or there may be some slight issues of compatibility.

More Information

The method of accessing the image resizer is very simple, you just pass the image to the component in an URL. This means that the image generator could potentially be integrated quite easily into any Joomla extension.

For more information see the documentation page.

The component and plugins can be downloaded here.