Help me create a useful gallery site with WordPress?

January 5, 2013 9:31 AM

I've not used WordPress for quite some time and the recent release of 3.5 with its new ways of handling media has me somewhat confuddled.

Say I created a gallery site about footwear. I'd regularly be posting lots of pictures of shoes, boots, sandals, etc..

Posts would be categorised under Shoes, Boots, Sandals, etc. but would also have specific tags - I would really love to have the ability to click on a post tag (e.g. 'gold buckle' or 'low heel') and have a gallery created containing images with that specific tag.

Is there a (free or cheap!) theme, plugin, article that will help me do this?

posted by humph to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Well, the good news is WP is going to knock this out of the park for you.
posted by phaedon at 9:45 AM on January 5

Can you explain, phaedon? It seems exactly what the OP is asking, but your answer is kind of short on specifics.
posted by rtha at 10:18 AM on January 5

Well I mean, it's not like tagging is new to 3.5. This functionality should be available in any gallery-type theme that you download. Then it's up to you assign posts tags. There's even a tag cloud menu out of the box.

I didn't want to recommend any one particular theme in AskMe because I wasn't sure if that is permitted but if you're looking for something specific I suggest Hoarder by Themezilla. Very high-quality product with above average support. You could describe it as being sort of Pinteresty. I use it for my site and it's sick. If you have any questions about how to implement, let me know.
posted by phaedon at 11:39 AM on January 5

phaedon, I'm very familiar with tagging, tag clouds, etc but the generation of an image gallery based on tags seems to be strangely obscure unless I'm googling badly (certainly a possibility!).

JohnnyPeck has a plugin called Tag Gallery but it's not been updated for a while. I'll certainly have a look at that in the absence of anything else but I just spotted a similar question to mine on the Themify forum dated two months ago (I have one of their themes so have access to the forum) and this is owner (and knowledgeable WordPress theme creator) Nick La's reply:

The [gallery] is a built-in core feature of WordPress (not the theme). I don't think WordPress can do this: "build a gallery on the fly from tags on images, but then have it displayed in the [gallery]". Although I heard they are revamping the gallery feature. Soon you can create album/galleries in the media library instead of having gallery individually in each post.

On with the search...
posted by humph at 1:07 PM on January 5

Can you clarify this a bit? Because I think pheadon is talking about simple tag-archive listings while you are talking about a gallery of images with a certain tag within a single post or page.

Where would you want to post that gallery (e.g.: on a page or post especially made for this tag) and should it update the gallery automatically as soon as there is a new post with a certain tag?

Are your images tagged or just the post they are displayed in?

The basic Wordpress gallery doesn't have this functionality, but Tag-Gallery + Media Tags would do the trick if you can find the Tag Gallery plugin anywhere. I wasn't able to locate it because it does not seem to be on Wordpress.org right now. I found a link for 0.1 version but it also gets me a 404.
posted by KMB at 1:35 PM on January 5

Good questions KMB - I hadn't thought of tagging the images and now I'm not clear on the best way to display the galleries generated. I even wondered if it would be better to go with a "related posts" if that can be generated via tags or featured images (all posts will have featured images generating a portfolio-style home page).

I need to read up more but I'll experiment with Tag Gallery + Media Tags tomorrow (along with a crash revision course in all things WordPress/media!).
posted by humph at 5:14 PM on January 5

Related Posts by Tag are no problem and there are numerous plugins for that (e.g.: Related Posts Thumbnails.

If you have further questions, don't hesitate to message me directly, but please note that because of probable time-differences my answers may arrive delayed.
posted by KMB at 11:55 PM on January 5

Thank you all for your responses (and kind memails!) to what I now see is a half-baked question - it's made me realise that I need to go back to the original idea and start planning better (this was started two years ago in an earlier verison of WordPress and with a theme that might not be right for this project).

(This article, 30 great WordPress portfolio plugins has been a great source of information, both for plugins and for clarifying what I'd like to do.)
posted by humph at 12:56 PM on January 7