IT блог

Let’s assume you have a wordpress page with multiple nextgen galleries. In my case I wanted to keep the sorting order of photos and maintainability and interleave the photos with some text. So, placing all the images into a single gallery wasn’t an option. And I couldn’t find a setting in the plugin to control generation of HTML representation of a gallery so that after reaching the last photo in a gallery you switch to the first photo in the next gallery. In this post I will tell you how to alter this logic.

Some intro. I use a FancyBox plugin with Nextgen Gallery. When its JS code opens a viewer after a click over an image, it will pick up only the images with exactly the same value in property rel of tag <a>, which wraps tag <img>:

<a href="http://hramsvtluki.ru/wp-content/gallery/holy_land_8_february/P_20170208_131157_1200.jpg" 
title="Description"
data-src="http://hramsvtluki.ru/wp-content/gallery/holy_land_8_february/P_20170208_131157_1200.jpg"
data-thumbnail="http://hramsvtluki.ru/wp-content/gallery/holy_land_8_february/thumbs/thumbs_P_20170208_131157_1200.jpg" 
data-image-id="839" data-title="P_20170208_131157_1200" 
data-description="Description"
class="ngg-fancybox fancybox image" rel="bccad7e26f86978320c50a335004e619">
<img title="P_20170208_131157_1200" alt="P_20170208_131157_1200" 
src="http://hramsvtluki.ru/wp-content/gallery/holy_land_8_february/thumbs/thumbs_P_20170208_131157_1200.jpg"
style="max-width:100%;" width="140" height="100"></img>
</a>

As you can see, by default each NG gallery produces a unique string value for rel property. In this particular case: bccad7e26f86978320c50a335004e619 . I thought it was a hash right from the beginning, and my code inspection proved that right: md5 hash. Actually I could finish the post right here as you have all the data to fix the issue by yourself 😉 But I didn’t.

In my opinion there will be no case, when I need to have several galleries with unique rel values. In other words. it’s OK for me to evaluate md5 hash of a string constant. So the code change is straighforward. Find in the file products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/nextgen_gallery_display/package.module.nextgen_gallery_display.php the line:

$displayed_gallery->id(md5(json_encode($displayed_gallery->get_entity())));

and change it this way:

$displayed_gallery->id(md5('dk2k'));

In fact, you can even try getting rid of md5, but I don’t know if the length of generated string is checked somewhere.

If you want to have a more sophisticated solution, you should think of adding a new param into shortcut of a gallery, say, custom_gallery_id:

[ngg_images source="galleries" container_ids="48" 
display_type="photocrati-nextgen_basic_thumbnails"
override_thumbnail_settings="0" thumbnail_width="120" 
thumbnail_height="90" thumbnail_crop="1" 
images_per_page="30" number_of_columns="4" 
ajax_pagination="0" show_all_in_lightbox="0"
use_imagebrowser_effect="0" show_slideshow_link="1" 
slideshow_link_text="Show slides" order_by="sortorder" 
order_direction="ASC" returns="included" 
maximum_entity_count="500" custom_gallery_id="a12"]

Then you need to handle this new param as follows: if it contains a non-null value, md5 hash is evaluated for this value. This way you will have flexible control and backward compatibility. For me it’s an overkill.

There can be a side effect: gallery’s id (overriden by us) is used in containing div for pagination:

<div class="ngg-galleryoverview ngg-ajax-pagination-none" id="ngg-gallery-bccad7e26f86978320c50a335004e619-1">

-1 is for the first page.
I don’t use the pagination, hence I can’t predict the consequences.

Sample page with multiple galleries and seamless switching between them can be seen here: page with several gallery and seamless switching between them

Suggested code change will be removed if you update the Nextgen Gallery plugin, you will have to aplly it again.