Gallery Development

Posted on 19th Jun 2007

Being exasperated by the available offerings for photo gallery management within WordPress, I decided to do what every self respecting geek should do, and write my own from scratch. This way I can incorporate all the features I want, but at the same time keep it easy to use so it can be used by anyone.

I’ve spent far too long on this so far, but it’s been a learning experience, being my first delve into WordPress plugin development.

The planned feature list is: (probably a bit ambitious)

• Images grouped into albums
• Automatic retrieval of EXIF information
• Tagging and comments system separate from main WordPress data
• View tracking
• Bulk uploading with zip files
• Online image editing, including rotation and cropping. Possibly other features, once I look into GD’s capabilities
• Full integration into WordPress frontend, with template tags and content tags
• Added buttons in TinyMCE for inserting tags
• Optional use of mod_rewrite for tidy URLs

How many of these features will make it into the v1.0 release is debatable, but I intend to get them all working over time.