PiXELWiT

I’ve been considering various open source image gallery solutions for my WordPress blog but I couldn’t decide which one would best meet my needs. Heck, I wasn’t even sure what my needs were so I decided a bit of research was in order. The most helpful information I found was an Image Plugin article on Lorelle’s site where she discusses the most common and popular solutions for working with images in a WordPress blog. After reading her post and many of the articles linked within it I decided I’d install Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin to get the most powerful and flexible system while maintaining modularity and simplicity. At least that was what I was hoping for.

Before I say too much more, I think it’s only fair to point out that I am a “tweaker”. I’m never satisfied with things in their original condition. Anything you can make, I can make better by adding more RAM and/or a hood scoop. 😉 In the name of Foreshadowing I’ll note that this does not bode well for the Gallery2 and WPG2 combo.

Since my web host uses AutoInstalls, installing Gallery2 was a snap. I made some galleries, uploaded images, activated all the included themes and tested things out. I was pretty impressed. Ratings, descriptions, titles, JavaScript effects, borders, viewing statistics, image manipulation, slide shows… Gallery2 did a pretty good job handling nearly every task associated with managing and creating an image gallery. But I didn’t really want or need all those features just yet which leads me to my main concern regarding Gallery2, it has so many features that performing some of the most common tasks, like modifying your gallery layout, can be rather daunting.

To help get my Gallery2 images into WordPress I downloaded and installed the WPG2 plugin and followed the installation instructions. The first thing I noticed was that my sidebar was missing. This is because WPG2 starts by calling the header of your theme then stripping out “the loop”, injecting the Gallery2 code, and finally appending your theme’s footer to tie it all together. If your theme’s sidebar isn’t called from the header or footer files (the index file for example), the sidebar won’t be displayed. I like my sidebar and want to keep it around so I searched for a way to bring it back. I needed to copy my theme’s header and footer files, modify them to accommodate the new structure (rearrange div tags), rename them and add them to my theme’s folder. Then everything looked funny so I needed to juggle my CSS file around and integrate the Gallery2 CSS as well. I can’t say the process was a smooth one. After much frustration I finally got everything running but there was still a lot of room for improvement. The Gallery2 logo needed t be removed, the Gallery2 sidebar needed to be removed… basically I would need to learn everything in the Gallery2 Themes:How To section.

This was getting to be a lot of work and the image gallery was straying further and further from my original goals of Modularity and Simplicity. So now I’m forced to reconsider my options. Although Gallery2 and WPG2 can be a very flexible and powerful combination they also have rather steep learning curves. Since I’m looking for something considerably different from a standard Gallery2 and WPG2 installation, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time learning how to make modifications, my best option might be to forgo a flexible solution in favor of one that better meets my current demands.

Update: Learn what image gallery solution I decided to use.

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