My mission is to build a small, simple, fast, reliable but very capable gallery plugin using standard WordPress technology.
The two fundamental objectives for this plugin are use WordPress standard technology and minimalism.
Use WordPress Standard Technology
Using WordPress standard technology means not using proprietary technology. The downside to a vendor’s proprietary technology is that it forces you to use the products of only that vendor or incur a possibly large conversion cost. Using standard WordPress technology gives you the freedom to switch to another vendor’s product with a small conversion cost. Using standard WordPress technology also means that the user interfaces will be WordPress like, which the user is already familiar with.
After conversion all images in this product are standard WordPress Media Library images. After conversion all galleries are standard WordPress galleries. The NextGEN Gallery shortcodes – nggtags, nggallery and singlepic are implemented by dynamically generating corresponding standard WordPress galleries.
The one major dilemma I had was that WordPress did not have a functional equivalent to NextGEN Gallery’s sort order. So, I have implemented this using a new WordPress taxonomy. Although this will require custom programming to use with another plugin the amount of programming is small.
Minimalism
Minimalism means no bloat, i.e., small, simple and fast. This is not a feature rich product. Features such as image manipulation – re-sizing, rotation, cropping, watermarking, .. are not included by design as these can either be done offline and/or is already available in WordPress. A light box for slide shows is not included as there already exists excellent light boxes that work with standard WordPress galleries. Further to minimize the size of this plugin in addition to omitting unneeded features whenever possible I have made use of already existing infrastructure in WordPress instead of making new infrastructure. This has the additional side benefit of making the user interfaces of this plugin very WordPress like, which the user is already comfortable with. This plugin by design focuses on facilities for dynamically generating WordPress standard galleries and not much else.
TML: Tags for Media Library 