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Free Plugin by maff v0.4.3

NextGEN Gallery Sidebar Widget

A widget to show NextGEN galleries in your sidebar.

NextGEN Gallery Sidebar Widget

The facts

Rating
5★ from 2
Active installs
500+
Price
Free
Last updated
6 Feb 2012
Added
Apr 2009
Requires WP
2.8
Tested up to
WP 3.3.2
Downloads
109,231

Our analysis

AI-assisted

The NextGEN Gallery Sidebar Widget is a WordPress plugin designed to display links to galleries in a sidebar. It allows you to specify the number of galleries to show, their order, and the thumbnail images used for each gallery.

This plugin is suitable for users who want to enhance their NextGEN Gallery experience by providing easy access to multiple galleries directly from the sidebar. It offers templating options for customisation, allowing users to control the widget’s output through their theme's directory.

Best for: This plugin suits users of NextGEN Gallery who want to showcase multiple galleries in their site's sidebar.

What it does well

  • Allows display of links to multiple galleries
  • Customisable gallery order and thumbnail settings
  • Supports templating for output control

Where it falls short

  • Last updated in February 2012, may not be compatible with newer WordPress versions
  • Limited to NextGEN Gallery integration

Verdict

The NextGEN Gallery Sidebar Widget provides a specific solution for displaying gallery links but may require caution due to its age and potential compatibility issues.

From the developer

maff's own description of NextGEN Gallery Sidebar Widget, lightly tidied.

The NextGEN widgets only allow showing of single images, I needed a solution to show links to galleries, so I wrote this widget. You can specify the following parameters:

  • Maximum Galleries: the number of galleries you want to show
  • Gallery Order: you can select random, date added ascending or date added descending
  • Gallery Thumbnail: which image should be taken as thumbail in the sidebar (preview set in NGG, first or random image)
  • AutoThumb parameters: if you got AutoThumb installed, the widget will use its functions to resize the image to your needs. Use a string like w=80&h=80&zc=1 here to show 80×80 square thumbnails.
  • Output width/height: if you don’t use AutoThumb, the plugin will set the HTML attributes width & height.
  • Default Link Id: the widget assumes that you set up pages for each gallery and link the gallery to that page (you can use the NGG Gallery Editor to do this). If a gallery has no link set, it will use the default link (id of a page or post).
  • Exclude galleries: exclude galleries by specifying their ID as comma separated list

All development is done on GitHub. If you have ideas, enhancements, etc. feel free to fork the project and send a pull request.

For any issues please use the Issue Tracker.

Templating:

Beginning with version 0.3, you have full control over the widget’s output as it is controlled with templates. As the built-in templates would get overwritten on every plugin update, create a new directory called “ngg-sidebar-widget” in your theme’s directory and copy the two template files “tpl.outer.html” and “tpl.inner.html” over there to edit them. The outer template is just a wrapper template (useful when you need some additional markup, e.g. when creating a list), the inner template has access to all the values from the gallery and image object (written in a simple templating syntax: {=object.member}). For the most use cases you should only need “gallery.title”, “gallery.link” and “image.url”.

You will have access to the following variables:

  • gallery
    • gid
    • name
    • path
    • title
    • galdesc
    • pageid
    • previewpic
    • author
    • link
    • errmsg
    • error
    • imageURL
    • thumbURL
    • imagePath
    • thumbPath
    • href
    • thumbPrefix
    • thumbFolder
    • galleryid
    • pid
    • filename
    • description
    • alttext
    • imagedate
    • exclude
    • thumbcode
    • name
    • path
    • title
    • pageid
    • previewpic
    • permalink
    • post_id
    • sortorder
    • meta_data
    • gid
    • galdesc
    • author
    • imageHTML
    • thumbHTML
    • url
    • output_width
    • output_height
    • output_width_tag
    • output_height_tag

    Read the full description on the official page →

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