When I was building the property gallery for greekislandpropertyfinders I wanted to use a fancy javascript image gallery like Galleria, however I came across a problem with Galleria in that it couldn’t display more than one gallery on any page. It’s open-source so I used the source code to help write my own version and turned it into a WordPress plugin with the features I needed.

The plugin isn’t all that generalised, so I’m not sure it’ll be useful to many people but I think it’s a tool worth sharing.

Plugin features:

• This plugin doesn’t change the WordPress media gallery admin interface – galleries are created and inserted into pages/posts as normal (i.e. using the media upload GUI + the
[gallery] shortcode). WordPress authors won’t need to change or learn anything new.
• The plugin makes efficient use of WordPress media (no front-end image resizing via CSS!) which means it doesn’t matter if one of your authors uploads a load of 3MB images to a gallery – it’ll still run fast.
• The plugin doesn’t pre-download images that aren’t needed – it displays a loading spinner image when the user is waiting for a image on load.
• Should be easy to style the gallery in your own way – uses CSS classes and IDs.
• The user can click on the main image to cycle through the gallery.
• Uses jQuery for cross-browser hover fade effects.
• Small JS footprint: 2854 bytes.
• Outputs valid XHTML (unlike the default WordPress gallery!).

Screenshot of the plugin:

Click to enlarge

Demo of plugin: www.greekislandpropertyfinders.co.uk/what-we-are-finding.

Download the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory.