Pimpin’ My WordPress – Part 4 – Integrating Gallery2 & WordPress
I recently got my photogallery back online, it’s been down for about 9 months as I was pretty upset with Gallery2 (from http://gallery.menalto.com). I’ve been using gallery for about 4 or so years now and have over 6000 images in my gallery currently! Yes SIX THOUSAND. My gallery is 6GB in size in fact. The reason I got upset with it is that it was just too much of an overhead beast to maintain (probably has to do with the 6000 images). I’ve been working on flash based galleries and converting to them in hopes that I could provide a simpler solution that didn’t require as much administration for my online gallery. Well, they aren’t there yet. All that’s really needed is a decent admin interface written that will export the XML files for you and categorize everything and they would be a winner.
Gallery2 is without question the best gallery application on the Internet though and with the recent update to 2.1.2 I decided to go ahead and upgrade my gallery and make it public once again. Plus you’d be surprised how many of my friends and family emailed me asking where it went. Kinda cool really.
So I decided now that it’s online I wanted to integrate Gallery2 with WordPress, seems like an easy enough request right, I mean afterall there’s just about every kind of plug-in for gallery you could ask for and every kind plus a dozen more for wordpress. At first I was testing out WPG2, seems like the best merger between gallery and wordpress, basically it would create your standard gallery pages within wordpress. This is great but I doubt my blog visitors want to see my 6000 images within my blog. Plus, it seems it requires the Gallery2 installation and wordpress installation running on the same server. Unfortunately, I run gallery (@ http://www.thejungle.org/gallery/) on a Linux based VPS running on Virtuozzo by SWsoft and my Blog (@ http://216.167.205.33/plesk-site-preview/jesscoburn.com/216.167.205.33) on a Windows 2003 based hosting account. The Linux VPS Blog hosting as well as everything else here is powered by Applied Innovations. So with different web servers, different database servers and not to mention different operating systems running the two sites WPG2 was not a solution for me. So back to google I went and I found Chunkeymoon’s blog and the Ultimate Gallery2 Slideshow Plugin. Which just so happens to be developed with the possibility that the two applications could be hosted on completely seperate servers just like mine.
The application/plug-in was extremely easy to install. I simply uploaded the plug-in to the wp-content/plugins folder (as is common) and activated it. I also uploaded and activated Tiger Style Administration which is probably the damn coolest mod to WordPress yet and I’ll follow up with a seperate blog entry about this one as it deserves it’s own.
Once The Ultimate Gallery2 Slideshow Plugin was loaded and activated, I had to define where the mysql database for gallery2 was located, the url to the gallery2 installation and that was pretty much it. Then I simply had to add the code tag that calls this plugin:
<?php ug2slideshow_print(); ?>
Which I placed in it’s own seperate box on the right column in my vistered little theme and instantly now have 20 images in a javascript based slide show on my blog adding yet another little personalized touch to my blog or in the Pimpin’ my blog motif, another touch of “BLING, BLING BABY!”
