The Free Software Foundation has announced they have released the GNU General Public License in version 3. You may read the announcement and the license here. The next versions of my plugins will already be relesed under the V3 and I encourage everyone to upgrade their OpenSource software to be available under the GPL V3!
Tyson recently informed me about a problem that can arise if you uninstall PlugInstaller. You might get stuck with seemingly “locked” plugin directories that make it impossible to manually delete any plugins that have been installed by PlugInstaller.
I have provided instructions on how to overcome this issue for all those of you who don’t like PlugInstaller any more.
This review covers the wordpress plugin NextGEN Gallery, version 0.61a, by Alex Rabe, Christian Arnold, Thomas Matzke, KeViN et al.
The NextGEN Gallery plugin is a very complex plugin that enables wordpress users to show their pictures within their blogs. For presentation, thumbnail galleries are supportet as well as flash slideshows (see below for more information).
You said "I will preferably review new plugins that are unknown to many wordpress users". Yes, that’s exactly what I said. There are two reasons that my first review covers the very well known NG-Gallery plugin: First, I said "preferably". This does not exclude well-known plugins from review. Second, the ng-gallery plugin has been one of the first "must-have" plugins I ever discovered in my rather short wordpress carreer.
But for now, lets turn to the point of it. I’m reviewing version 0.61a which, at the time this review has been written, has been the latest version available on wordpress.org.
Installation of NG Gallery is very straightforward. It nees the usual steps to be installed wich are documented inside the wordpress.org compatible readme file, and it it is fully compatible to PlugInstaller, so installing the plugin is really a simple task. Only if you want to include the flash slideshow option, you will have to manually download the slideshow applet which is provided by a third-party author and which is not available under the GPL. This is a bit annoying, but I’m afraid that, due to license restictions, this situation will not change in the near future and it’s of course not the fault of the plugin authors.
Don’t forget to create a directory "wp-content/gallery" and to chmod it to 777, as ng-gallery is unable to create the gallery folders below otherwise.
After having installed and activated the plugin, a new section is added to your administration settings. From there you can manage everything related to the plugin. Also, there is an extensive list of options available to the user, many of which may seem to be confusing at first glance, but the standard settings perform quite well with most wordpress themes.
After successfully installing the ng-gallery plugin, your first question might (and probably will) be "how do I use the damn thing?". A very basic description with the most important instructions is provided within the readme file, but actually the admin interface options are mostly self-explaining, and you can always experiment with some options until you find out what they mean. Unfortunately, I did not find any instructions to explain the differences and different uses of "Galleries" and "Albums".
The plugin boasts so many features that I am not able to cover them all without risking to bore you. So I will stick to the most important features, you will have to see it yourself to be able to judge the load of features this plugin provides.
To use the plugin, you will have to create a gallery first. This is very straightforward, and the plugin even supports uploading multiple files in one step (of course, as the upload mechanism is html based, you will have to select each file individually) or importing a gallery that has been uploaded to the server before (maybe with an FTP client). You will only need a few minutes to upload your gallery, as thumbnails for the gallery preview are automatically generated according to your settings. After having uploaded your images, the gallery is almost immediately ready to use. You may add titles or descriptions to each single picture, or instantly use the gallery insinde your postings. It’s a pity you cannot edit the gallery name (which is used to create the page title when embedding the gallery into a newly created page) and the gallery title (wich is displayed to your visitors) in a single step. Now you may either link your gallery to a page, or insert a tag into your articles which includes the gallery into any existing or new posting. To make this really comfortable, NG gallery adds a TinyMCE toolbar button that lets your select the desired gallery from a dropdown combobox and inserts the tag automatically. You can also put galleries together as an "album", the purpose of which I did not quite understand, but it seems that this is a space-saving way to link to galleries within posts. But adding galleries to albums features a nice drag ‘n drop user interface, wich is still a bit buggy.
For presentation of your galleries, there are two main views available: a thumbnail preview which is configurable by different styles (and may be a bit tricky to adapt to your site’s theme), and a flash slideshow, which requires the user to download and manually install a flash slideshow applet provided by a third party author. Upon clicking on a preview thumbnail, there is a nice "fade out" feature for the page background, a customizable loading toolbar and a nice, web 2.0 style image display option (see the screenshots below).
A third party contributor wrote a sidebar widget for ng gallery that is actually a set of three different sidebar items: a method to display random images, the most recent images or a slideshow of a single gallery. These widgets are configurable but showed strange behaviour when I tested them with different settings. The sidebar widgets are included in the ng gallery package.
NG gallery is really easy to use if you are once familiar with its options and the process of managing galleries. The feature I really did miss is the ability to comment on pictures inside a gallery. If you want your visitors to post comments on single pictures, you will have to encourage them to comment on the article containing the gallery, naming the picture the comment is related to. I still hope to see this feature in a future release. Also, there is no way to rate pictures, which would be nice in combination with a per-picture commenting system, especially for photographers or artists who present their work on their blogs.
This screenshot gallery is presented to you, of course, using ng gallery. If you want to see the postings this screenshots have been created with in action, feel free to experiment with my demo posting in the wordpress testing environment.
This gives you a summary on NextGEN gallery and provides you with the most important facts on NextGEN gallery.
| Plugin name and version | Next GEN Gallery 0.61a |
| Installation rating | easy to medium |
| PlugInstaller compatible | yes, with automatic updates |
| Manual installation adjustment needed | sometimes |
| Configuration rating | medium |
| Usage rating | easy to medium |
| Wordpress compatibility (according to author) | 2.1.3 - 2.2.1 |
| Multilanguage | yes |
| Overall rating | must-have (5 out of 5) |
You may visit the development blog or download the plugin from the wordpress.org plugin repository.
In my reviews I use the following ratings:
Thanks to ovizii, a major and very severe bug has been discovered in version 0.2.0 of PlugInstaller. The bug could lead to complete unusability of your wordpress installation, if the wrong plugin packages were installed. Only users of version 0.2.0 are affected by this issue.
Please, update your installation of PlugInstaller IMMEDIATELY to prevent damage to your wordpress installation!
Today, I have launched two separate wordpress installations that act as a testing platform to support plugin develoment and -debugging without risking to destroy a production wordpress installation. One of the test sites, found here, will always feature the latest release of wordpress. The other test site, found here, runs the obsolete 1.5.2 version of wordpress, to test the downward compatibility of newer plugins. I will mainly use these test blogs for my plugin reviews and the development of my own plugins, but if you are a plugin author, you are welcome to send me a copy of your plugin to be tested in those environments. BTW, both installations are non-standard-directory installations of Wordpress that can help people developing on standard installations find problems and mistakes in their plugin’s directory implementation.
Current Version: 0.1.0
Are you using ActiveLink? You may want to consider donating to support the development of new features!
ActiveLink allows you to set links to wikipedia articles by means of a wikipedia-style syntax when typing your posts.
Download:
activelink.0.1.0.zip (2,14 KB)
Installation:
Still empty…
Planned features:
Just write a comment below!
I have decided to write about and recommend plugins to all PlugInstaller users by reviewing them on this site. I did not have the time to write any reviews yet, but I am looking for possible review candidates. So if you have devloped or stumpled upon a plugin that might be especially useful, you are welcome to send me a link to this plugin to have it reviewed.
Also, take a look at this page to get more information and some links to other plugin review sites.
If you are looking for even more plugin reviews, you might find some here: sw-guide (german), BlogHelper (english), pixelgraphix.de (german).
On this page, I am reviewing some of the most useful plugins for wordpress. If you have found a plugin you find especially useful, or if you are a plugin author who wants to "spread the word" about her new plugin, you are welcome to suggest plugins to be reviewed here. Of course, I am not taking any money to review plugins, but please remember that I am doing this work in my spare time, so I will not be able to review every plugin you might suggest. My work will be concentrated on (but not limited to) those plugins that are not (yet) known to a large audience. If you submit a plugin for review, please specify the plugin’s name, the plugin homepage (if there is any) and the download location.
2007-07-06: NextGEN gallery 0.61a
I am planning to include a list of "recommended plugins" in PlugInstaller, if this functionality is supported by a majority of its users. Please vote if you would like to have such a functionality included in a future release of PlugInstaller.
Loading …As PlugInstaller 0.2 seems to be in a quite stable state, I am looking for suggestions on how to improve PlugInstaller further. As a feature list, I have collected the following items:
If you can think of additional features that should be included in future releases, feel free to write comments on this post.
