Building this Blog Site

Plugins added to blog

As with Gallery, there are hundreds of plugins available to enhance the functionality of WordPress. There are three areas I’m interested in expanding the functionality of the site:

• Integrating my Gallery2 photos into the blog, so I can have select pics displayed in the post, and also link to key parts of the gallery. I am using WPG2 for this and the rest of this entry looks at getting that up and working.
• Including maps in my travel entries so I can show routes and points of interest. I have been trying a few things here, but not had a lot of success yet.
• Including video’s, such as YouTube links, into pages.

I tend to use the “code” option for maintaining the entries and pages (instead of the “visual” option). So whatever mechanism I’ve chosen for the bits of functionality above need to make it easy to implement through coding.

Another selection criteria was whether the plugin/mechanism selected worked with the theme I’m using, and possibly other themes, without significant modifications. I found quite a few plugins that worked fine with the vanilla WP theme, but didn’t with this one.

Linking to Gallery2 photos through the WPG2 Plugin

There are a few plugins available to integrate gallery installations with WP. My main interest was to be able to include thumbnails or cut-down pictures in my blog entries that add interest to the text and link off to the complete photo album. I wasn’t really interested in a photo blog, I wanted the two separate.

The installation and configuration of WPG2 was reasonably straightforward. I don’t know what I did originally, but I was getting “p” tags instead of “div” tags and the text wasn’t floating around the images correctly. I did have to install some plugins to Gallery, which were picked up when I first activated it. In the end I deactivated and reactivated it and everything was ok.

I use a mix of full-width images (which are panoramic format, equivalent to 6×17 or 6×24) that are 510px wide, and thumbnails (150px wide) floating left or right. Because the gallery is using a square thumbnails plugin, the thumbnails in WP come out square. I did need to tweak the CSS settings a bit.

I’m very impressed with how the imbedding and linking works, it’s great. The only suggestion I’d have is to be able to set a target=new for the links, rather than opening in the current window/tab.

I have added two WPG2 items the random image (from the Image Block gallery plugin) which uses the readfile class, and the gallery tree view display which uses the print wpg2_make_html_album_tree() function.

Note one gotcha. I started playing with the base “img” CSS settings in style.css and found that the image tree was all messed up. There is a wpg2.css that has some of the settings for this tree, but others default to the settings in style.css. I had to set some overrides in wpg2.css to cancel out changes I’d made to style.css.

.dtree img {
border: 0px;
vertical-align: middle;
/* added the following to overwrite the img tag in style.css */
/* DAE 26.03.08 */
padding: 0px;
margin: 0px;
float: none;
}

Note that I tried the WPG Gallery Remote plugin as it supports multiple galleries. But I was getting PHP errors when I tried to activate it, so I put it into the “I’ll come back to this” bucket.

More Plugin fun

I’ve continued this exploration of the trials and tribulations of plugins in Building This Blog Site – Part 2.

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