Introducing NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is a gallery plugin by Alex Rabe, and is undeniably one of the most popular in the WordPress user sphere at the moment. This is due primarily to its robust features, the active support provided by Alex and also because it is currently under active development, so feature requests are welcome.

I have been following its progress since one of the earlier alpha releases (it is currently at 0.63) and leaps and bounds have been made from the original. Alex based the functionality of the plugin on an existing solution called MyGallery and then proceeded to mix in various other tools such as JQuery, Thickbox to create this plugin.

The most important points, I’m sure, for most users evaluating a new plugin are to

• See it in action
• Test the admin interface
• Evaluate its usability for their application in terms of features and system requirements
• Ease of customisation

If you’re like me, you’ll want to be able to plug-and-go almost 90% of the time. This means that display and also the admin interface are particularly crucial. For NextGEN Gallery, Alex has provided a few ‘case study’ links on the information page, as well as screenshots of the admin interface, and live demos of individual gallery pages. If you happen to be looking for more live sites, there is also the thread for people to post their in-action galleries.

Features wise, as mentioned before, NextGEN Gallery already has some fabulous functions (based on MyGallery) such as

• Uploading images via zip file
• Unlimited albums
• Slideshow
• Multiple display effects – CSS files and also Javascript based Thickbox, Lightbox, Grey box
• Watermarking

Of those listed, I have really only evaluated Watermarking fully. The aim though, is to thoroughly test run NextGEN Gallery from installation, configuration, usage and further customisation, so in the next post, I’ll be writing in more detail about Installing NextGEN Gallery.