Apr 16 2010

WordPress image gallery plugin

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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:

Screenshot of Bitvolution-image-galleria plugin

Click to enlarge

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

Download the plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Plugin with the following tags: , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “WordPress image gallery plugin”

  1. Ls Says:

    Hey Bitvolution,

    I really like this gallery and I am using it for a website. It is really basic and that”s what I like about it. I think it is quite a good tool. The only problem is that it has no image captioning. You did not implement this yet did you?

    Greets and thanks for sharing this!
    Ls

    Submitted May 12th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
  2. Tom Fotherby Says:

    Thanks Lauren,
    You’re right, image captioning would be a useful feature (and good for SEO) – I have released a new version of the plugin (v0.1) which supports it. To add a caption to any image in the gallery fill in the caption textbox in the WordPress gallery dialog.

    Thanks for your feedback,
    Tom

    Submitted May 19th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
  3. Valentijn Says:

    Hi

    Using 0.03 version of WP galleria in 2.9.1
    And using php4 on iis7 win system.

    I changed 2 things :

    // Member variables
    var $bitvol_galleria_version; //instead of public…

    And changed : function BitvolutionImageGalleria() //instead of public function BitvolutionImageGalleria()

    At this moment this php4 hack works for now :-)

    Submitted June 29th, 2010 at 4:08 pm
  4. Tom Fotherby Says:

    Hi,

    I use PHP 5 so didn’t know the plugin wasn’t working in PHP 4. Thanks for the info on making it work with PHP 4.

    What is the convention when it comes to backwards compatibility? Do most other plugins work with PHP 4? Should I change my code so it works with PHP 4?

    Submitted July 13th, 2010 at 7:23 am

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