Nextgen Posts
Choosing A WordPress Photo Gallery
So, after reading Sara's post "Why YOU should blog" on www.developerdame.com I decided to finally get off my butt and start my own blog. I sorted some hosting and installed WordPress but I wanted more. I have an interest in photography and wanted a fully featured gallery that integrated with WordPress and fitted into whatever theme I happened to choose. A quick Google later and NextGEN gallery seemed to be the popular choice. First impressions were good; a good administration interface, thumbnail generation, a variety of choices for lightbox style display and a variety of shortcodes for displaying albums and pictures in both posts and pages.
However, NextGEN does not dynamically generate pages with friendly URLs for albums in the gallery. From what I could determine, each album would have to be manually attached to a page configured through WordPress and displayed via shortcodes. I guess I could have written a plugin that generated these pages for me, but I decided to investigate standalone gallery solutions and whether these could be successfully integrated with WordPress. Another session on Google led me to Zenphoto. Again, first impressions were good; a good administration interface, thumbnail generation, support for plugins and themes, but most importantly for me Zenphoto is simple and bloat-free. In the words of the developers:
Zenphoto is an answer to lots of calls for an online gallery solution that just makes sense. After years of bloated software that does everything and your dishes, zenphoto just shows your photos, simply. It’s got all the functionality and “features” you need, and nothing you don’t. Where the old guys put in a bunch of modules and junk, we put a lot of thought. We hope you agree with our philosopy: simpler is better. Don’t get us wrong though –zenphoto really does have everything you need for your online gallery, and you’ll even stare in awe at some of the innovative innovations we innovated upon.
Installation was a breeze and within five minutes I had a working vanilla gallery. So, how to integrate Zenphoto with WordPress...