Initially, I had installed this blog day before yesterday into a sub-directory on my domain. About ten minutes ago I’ve decided to migrate the site into the root so some things may not be working properly for a bit as I clean up.
Update: As I was migrating the website I lost the post about tag-gallery. Why did I lose it? Because I edited the db by hand deleting post revisions and accidentally selected that post. I always make backups before doing anything like this but considering the site is only two days old and there were only a few records I decided against it just to get the site up and moving. Shame on me.
Tag Gallery
A few days ago I was looking for a better way to manage galleries in WordPress for a friends new site. We found it rather awkward to deal with the built in gallery short-code when it came to removing images from a gallery or even adding them. It seems ridiculous that media must be uploaded through a post or page to add it to a gallery. Even more annoying is that you must delete an image from the Media Library as a whole just to remove it from a gallery on any given page. This is rather unintuitive. I think media should be managed completely by the Media Library and attached/unattached from pages or posts at will. The post should simply be a vehicle to display media, not a part of the management of such.
I went searching for a better gallery implementation and of the 300 or so image plugins available none of them seem to do what we wanted. I don’t want to install a whole new media management system such as NextGen gallery as WordPress already provides a Media Library. I don’t want to host my media with an external provider as I would much rather keep control of my assets in one place: my blog. I want to manage media in a more intuitive manner and very much like the gallery short-code without the shortcomings.
I found Justin Tadlock’s Cleaner Gallery which cleans up the built in gallery and allows for very easy inclusion of java-script lightbox effects such as the Thickbox which is included with WordPress. Cleaner Gallery is a step in the right direction but still does not overcome the cumbersome management of the galleries, and it was never meant to! Shortly after I found Paul Menard’s Media Tags plugin which is absolutely great. So why not mash up the two into a Cleaner Gallery managed by Media Tags!
Introducing Tag Gallery. It’s a quick piece of work and solves the issues of managing galleries, at least for me. Your mileage may vary. It is a short-code implementation and you can include as many of them as you wish on any given post or page. You can set the thumbnail width and height and whether or not to show captions. If you have Cleaner Gallery installed it will use your java-script settings from that plugin for the display of your tag-gallery. In fact, Tag Gallery generates the same markup as Cleaner Gallery and even includes the CSS from that plugin. Why reinvent the wheel when you can maintain compatibility?
Read More »