NextGEN Gallery Sidebar Widget

The NextGEN widgets only allow showing of single images, I needed a solution to show links to galleries, so I wrote this widget. You can specify the following parameters:

• Maximum Galleries: the number of galleries you want to show
• Gallery Order: you can select random, date added ascending or date added descending
• Gallery Thumbnail: which image should be taken as thumbail in the sidebar (preview set in NGG, first or random image)
• AutoThumb parameters: if you got AutoThumb installed, the widget will use its functions to resize the image to your needs. Use a string like w=80&h=80&zc=1 here to show 80×80 square thumbnails.
• Output width/height: if you don’t use AutoThumb, the plugin will set the HTML attributes width & height.
• Default Link Id: the widget assumes that you set up pages for each gallery and link the gallery to that page (you can use the NGG Gallery Editor to do this). If a gallery has no link set, it will use the default link (id of a page or post).
• Exclude galleries: exclude galleries by specifying their ID as comma separated list

All development is done on GitHub. If you have ideas, enhancements, etc. feel free to fork the project and send a pull request.

For any issues please use the Issue Tracker.

Templating:

Beginning with version 0.3, you have full control over the widget’s output as it is controlled with templates. As the built-in templates would get overwritten on every plugin update, create a new directory called “ngg-sidebar-widget” in your theme’s directory and copy the two template files “tpl.outer.html” and “tpl.inner.html” over there to edit them. The outer template is just a wrapper template (useful when you need some additional markup, e.g. when creating a list), the inner template has access to all the values from the gallery and image object (written in a simple templating syntax: {=object.member}). For the most use cases you should only need “gallery.title”, “gallery.link” and “image.url”.

You will have access to the following variables:

• gallery
  • gid
  • name
  • path
  • title
  • galdesc
  • pageid
  • previewpic
  • author
  • link
• image
  • errmsg
  • error
  • imageURL
  • thumbURL
  • imagePath
  • thumbPath
  • href
  • thumbPrefix
  • thumbFolder
  • galleryid
  • pid
  • filename
  • description
  • alttext
  • imagedate
  • exclude
  • thumbcode
  • name
  • path
  • title
  • pageid
  • previewpic
  • permalink
  • post_id
  • sortorder
  • meta_data
  • gid
  • galdesc
  • author
  • imageHTML
  • thumbHTML
  • url
  • output_width
  • output_height
  • output_width_tag
  • output_height_tag

1. Upload ngg-sidebar-widget.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Use the widget in the widget editor.

• 0.4: Add include_galleries option
• 0.3.3.1: Fix bug on widget no displaying galleries when no exclusions are set (bug #59, #60)
• 0.3.3: Fix wrong maximum galleries (bug #58)
• 0.3.2: Image output width fix in template, Cleanup
• 0.3.1: Gallery limit bugfix
• 0.3: WordPress 2.8+ widget API, gallery exclusion option, templating feature
• 0.2.2: Add gallery_thumbnail option to select thumbnail image (preview, first, random)