NextGEN Gallery for WordPress
I have been working on developing a site for a friend today, and marvelling at how easy it is these days to set up a professional looking web property with almost no coding at all. Looking back, I remember a day when you started your site with a <head> tag and went from there, coding in HTML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP and even MIVA Script. Now, you just need to install a CMS like WordPress and away you go.
WordPress has to rank somewhere in the open source top 10, alongside Debian Linux, Apache, and MySQL. It is easy, flexible, (mostly) friendly and very comprehensive. I have only touched a few lines of code today, and yet I have a fully functioning photographer’s website. However the icing on the cake came with the discovery of NextGEN, a free gallery plugin for WordPress.
NextGEN installs simply (just unzip it to your WordPress plugins directory), and once enabled just adds an extra tab to the WordPress admin interface:
You then just need to create a gallery, and upload pictures to it. If you have lots of pictures to add, the easiest way is to upload all of them into one folder on your web server and use NextGEN’s “Import Image Folder” feature:
This will create a brand new gallery containing all of the images you have uploaded. Once you’ve got your gallery, you can customise it any way you’d like, including managing sort order, ALT tags, thumbnail size etc. You can create a WordPress Page for the gallery right from the Gallery Settings area (click for a larger image):
Once you’ve got the gallery showing on your site, maintaining it is easy. Either upload new images to the gallery folder and click “Scan Folder for New Images” (above), or upload images one at a time through the NextGEN web interface.
Finally, and most importantly NextGEN’s on-site display is excellent. It’s not quite as slick as some Flash galleries (although I believe there is a slick Flash NextGEN plugin I haven’t tried yet), but it’s functional and still nice looking. The site I’m working on isn’t live yet, but I couldn’t resist adding a basic version to this blog – see my new Photos section!
