Today is a great day ! It’s the release of NextGEN Gallery v1.00, a breakthrough gallery system for WordPress 2.7, with a revolutionary UI …(Ups, take the keynote from Steve Jobs). Ok, let’s get serious :
I’m working on this release the last half year, from the very first version ( Published at 09.march 2007 ) till today I learned a lot about PHP, WordPress and plugin coding. The code of this plugin evolved not in all direction straight forward, so it was time to rework parts without including more and more features. It’s a hard way to program a gallery system, which should not end up as Gallery2/Coppermine clone, but contain all needed features for the requirements of 10.000 users.
This new version is for myself a milestone, the code is now much more flexible and a good start for future enhancements. Here is a small summary about the changes :
- It import all tags into the WordPress core taxonomy system, so it drop two database tables
- Added a flexible template engine, so that you can restyle the output for your needs
- Support of ImageMagick , thanks to the work of Frederic de Ranter
- Core support of MediaRSS and Cooliris/PicLens, thanks to the work of Vincent Prat
- Move / Copy images between galleries
- Show Exif / Meta information inside the imagebrowser or single picture
A look into the future :
WordPress increases with every major release the amount of functions, also the core gallery systems is now much more flexible and I’m sure that it will be still be extended in the future. I think I should start a nice transition into the core gallery so that you can switch of the plugin if you didn’t need it longer for your purpose. For example : Some users requested a comment feature on every image, this is already a feature of the core gallery system, so I didn’t need to reprogram this part. NextGEN Gallery offers a folder and gallery based structure, the WordPress Gallery is a post/page based gallery structure, but it’s possible to sync both structures with a index key.
I’m open for all your ideas and recommendation, thanks to all the testers, translators and users which support me during the last two years.
Get the new version here :
Download NextGEN Gallery Version 1.0.0
Release version @ WordPress.org