I think everyone would agree that getting images, and image gallery into your blogs is crucial. At some point people would get sick of reading just our words. So when I started using wordpress I just “ass-umed” that it had an easy interface to upload and edit images, and to create an image gallery.
I might be considered biased since for my day job I create a CMS which does that. But realistically if someone can argue that creating and uploading an image gallery in WP is “easy” then I would like to hear it. Here was my experience.
So like a typical a user I spent a good 10mins getting my images ready which were on the SD card from a digital camera. I had them all organized and named correctly. I then went about wordpress looking where I could upload my images. It might be very obvious to everyone else, but I just didn’t notice the Upload/Insert “Image, Video, Music” icons on the top of the post toolbar. I think that is about the only thing I can take the blame for.
I did notice the nice Media nav item. I clicked onto that and saw the nice flash multi-uploader. I thought to myself wow this cool I can be done in the next 10mins. I uploaded the images. But then realized that some needed to be resized and rotated. And the gallery tool would not allow for that. So I started searching on the web on how to best do that. I found 2 plugins as an alternative which would do that, Scissors and then ImageManager . As it turned ImageManager is EOL , and everyone has to use scissors. So off I went and with 4 easy clicks was enable to install it on my blog. I clicked onto the media manager , and once you click on the image you get some of the basic image editing facilities . Ok so that worked out well. I was able to fix the couple of images I needed to.
So now I want to figure out how to get an image gallery into 1 of my blog posts. Well the shock and horror I needed some more plugins to create an image gallery. Now if it was any other time I would want to go through the 100’s of options , configure 1 or 2 of them change the php and js code to my liking and then use it. But I just want a simple image gallery. So again search engine to the rescue, I find that there are well over 100 different plugins for an image gallery. Now don’t get me wrong choice is good, choice is great but having a 100 plugins for an image gallery is a little silly and arguably wasted resources. Atleast 15 of them have the same rating and none of them are incredibly well supported. And I mean some are never going to be supported , the most classic line I found in the documentation was “The author has no time and plans of supporting this plugin. You are on your own. You have been warned!” .And trust me I don’t blame the developer of the plugin at all. I have done stuff like this where I quickly need a script and I create it publish but have no plans on ever supporting/upgrading it. But really shouldn’t someone at wordpress be figuring out if these plugins are worth it to be listed ?
The one I heard a lot about was WPG2 . It seemed to be the defacto plugin people gravitate towards. Well I noticed it managed to create a new page for me, and this was meant to be my gallery page . Ok well that wasn’t that bad except the page was all distorted, the footer was missing, the header was on the left in a corner. So I decided hell I would just delete the page, but before that I went to preview it.
Well I got nice error “Sorry.. WPG2 Page can not be displayed until WPG2 Plugin has been Validated.”
Ok well I guess better do that. I clicked on the WPG2 in the nav, and found out that it was looking for gallery2 path “WPG2 plugin cannot locate the Gallery2 installation.” . Ok well nothing told me this plugin depended on the other. But no big deal. Well as it turns out that gallery2 is its own software, requiring its own database and so on. Well that I just found ridiculous, I need an entire new software and then a plugin for getting an image gallery in wordpress.
So I figured why not try 1 of those other 100 plugins. So I downloaded and installed 2 of them ImageReloaded, IImage Gallery. Well both of them have their pros and cons. What I found annoying was that I had to inline the images in the blog entry. That was just messy to deal with.
So I decided to backtrack and suck it up and install Gallery software. Who would have thought that you need a software for an imagegallery, I am sure it does a lot of other things which is great if you want to galleries for your livelihood but unless this thing serves me coffee and sandwiches I didn’t see much use for it. Well after downloading installing it, I went back WPG2 and found that now I needed a plugin for Gallery2 called ImageBlock and then another plugin called Imageframe . Ok well that has to be fun, I mean at this rate I could recursively install all the plugins in the world to get an Image Gallery. At the end of it all I finally got the sucess message from WPG2 , and then also a warning
“WPG2 will generate your WordPress header using the CSS Elements specified in the WPG2 Output options. For some WordPress themes this will incorrectly distort the output from Gallery2 and instead you may need to create your own WPG2 Header.”
I mean come on now I might have a problem with my theme. Well praying to the gods of computers and php and wordpress alike I hoped that was not the case.
I went back to the original WPG2 page and I get this
”
Fatal G2 error
Here’s the error from G2: Error (ERROR_MISSING_OBJECT)
- in modules/core/classes/helpers/GalleryUserHelper_medium.class at line 143 (GalleryCoreApi::error)
- in modules/core/classes/GalleryCoreApi.class at line 606 (GalleryUserHelper_medium::fetchUserByUserName)
- in /home/content/w/a/v/waveeq/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wpg2/wpg2embed.inc at line 229 (GalleryCoreApi::fetchUserByUserName)
- in /home/content/w/a/v/waveeq/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wpg2/wpg2embed.inc at line 110
- in /home/content/w/a/v/waveeq/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wpg2/wpg2template.inc at line 46
- in ??? at line 0
- in /home/content/w/a/v/waveeq/html/wordpress/wp-includes/plugin.php at line 339
- in /home/content/w/a/v/waveeq/html/wordpress/wp-includes/template-loader.php at line 7
- in /home/content/w/a/v/waveeq/html/wordpress/wp-blog-header.php at line 16
- in /home/content/w/a/v/waveeq/html/wordpress/index.php at line
WOW. WOW. FATAL Error.
Normally I would love to tinker and fix this. I am the guy who has written more lines of php then he can remember, setup sybase replication being drunk and asleep at the same time, architechted/designed 3 different cms’s. Dealt with error and issues across several different systems, but really I don’t have the patience for this. My life is too short to take an entire 3hrs to get an image gallery.
So after all that I decided I was better of by installing the NextGen Gallery, and re upload my images