- living one bug at a time.

I've recently been working on imagecache 2.x... It's not the original update I planned with the full transformer conversion, but a major rewrite none the less. ImageCache 2.x is currently feature complete and ready for testing.

Overview:

Scale and Crop
UnConed sent me a patch to replace the awkward scale to inside/outside dimensions with Drupal core's scale and crop function. I think this much simplifies the configuration of many presets.

Private Files Support
Support for private files is a long standing feature request. It's here now. It provides per preset access control for derivatives. I still want to add support for apache served presets with private files enabled, It needs to be a flag on each preset.

Improved Error Responses
I updated imagecache to return either 403/404 images per preset or 403/404 response codes if access is denied to a preset or the source image cannot be found respectively. If a preset cannot be found imagecache should issue a 404 response, and if an error occurs imagecache should return a 500 response. Returning proper headers should prevent a few browser requests for missing and access denied images.

Strip file_directory_path
Imagecache has long been plagued with long difficult URL's. That is no more in the 2.x version, the imagecache urls no longer contain file_directory_path() within the imagecache namespace.

Restructured Code
Nearly everything happening in imagecache was occuring in one monolithic function. This has been broken up so that there are menu callback handlers for private and public fililes, a helper function for handling an imagecache request and sending the proper response to the browser, and a function for building imagecache derivatives.

Uses ImageAPI
Core's image.inc requires a write to disk per image operation, using valuable disk i/o and reducing image quality. I wrote a replacement to image.inc called ImageAPI that operates on in memory image objects, and allows you to use multiple image toolkits simultaneously.

hook_imagecache_action
You can now implement your own imagecache actions by using hook_imagecache_action, see the example in ImageCache.