NextGen Gallery is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to display images in Albums and Galleries. Albums contain groups of Galleries. Galleries contain groups of images.

For example: if you wanted to display your images of fishing trips to Alaska over the last several years, you’d have an Album for Alaska, and Galleries for the years. Or say you visit Disney World, you could have an Album for Disney, then include a Gallery for each of the parks: Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Studios, Animal Kingdom. Once you understand how things are organized, it’s easy.

On your settings, under Gallery, uncheck the Deactivate gallery page link – this will allow the system to use your pages as you’ve named them, not with the generic gallery naming – it’s just more friendly.

Adding images to a Gallery:

First have the pictures you’d like to add in a zip file. These will be organized into a Gallery. The zip file’s maximum size will depend on your hosting configuration. You can see this by going to Gallery > Overview and looking for PHP Max Upload Size. This is the easiest way to get images to the server since many non-technical folks have trouble with ftp clients and where things should go on the server.

Creating a Gallery and Uploading images:

To add a new Gallery: Go to Add Gallery / Images. You’ll see a tabbed interface with several choices.

Click the Upload a Zip-File tab at the top.
Browse to find your zip file on your computer.
Choose “a new gallery” if this is a new gallery, or choose the gallery you’d like to add the images to.

Click Start Upload.

This does several things: it will upload the zip file, unzip the images onto the server and enter them into the system where you can add descriptions etc. Thumbnails are also automatically created, too.

To work with your new Gallery: Go to Manage Gallery.

This shows a list of all of your galleries. You can click the link to edit or work with the individual images.

On this page you can edit the Alt and Title text for the images, tag them with keywords, remove them or exclude them from showing. This area will also allow you to move individual or groups of images to other Galleries if you need to move them. (you don’t have to re-upload)

This is also where you can assign a page to display this Gallery. Recommend using the Create a Page and selecting the Parent page for the new page to be listed under. Example: Call a page Magic Kingdom 2009 and Select Disney World as the parent. Then you can use the NextGen button (which is added to your visual editor) to add the short code for the gallery. This is nice because you can add more information and detail to the page, then display the album & galleries, to tell the whole story.

Once you’ve added your Gallery, go back to Manage Albums and add the Gallery to the appropriate Album. This will update the pages so they show the thumbnails and images.

Once you’ve gotten images added to Galleries, you can add the Gallery Widget to your sidebar. This will automatically display a number of random images in your sidebar from your Galleries.  You can control which Galleries are included and how many images to show. It’s a great way to add interest to your site.

This is just a quick overview of some of the plugin’s features,  for a more detailed look, David Potter has a NextGen Review that covers everything in minute detail.

Rae Hoffman conceived the plugin which was created by Joost de Valk, Wordpress Plugin Expert.

The CYC plugin allows your registered backend users see your branding and design on the login and profile pages. It will apply your theme to the following: registration, login, logout, lost password and profile pages. This only happens for users who are do not have editing capabilities ie. Subscribers- just for those folks who login to comment. Users who are admins, editors, etc. are not affected and will still see the usual Wordpress login and admin pages. The CYC plugin will automatically direct Subscribers who login to their profile page.

Installation was a snap, unzip and upload the plugins folder to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then activate it and you’re ready to begin using it.

Some customization may be needed to work with your theme, this varies according to the theme you’re using. You’ll want to be familiar with html, css, and be able to recognize a bit of php in order to tackle this. There is an admin settings page to make the needed changes. This plugin is all set to work with the Thesis theme.

I’ve tested it and there are still some things to work out. I was able to install and activate the plugin without error. Some customization tweaks are needed to make it play well together. Some notes on my findings:

• My Semiologic Pro skin and it’s customizations to style were shown, however the header graphic and footer area were missing.
• The sidebars were a bit out of place, with one sidebar being pushed below the content. This can be fixed with some styling tweaks.
• Had to turn off the semiologic pro meta function, just for the profile page – it generated an error when trying to make the meta keyword tag for that page. Not a big deal, and a small bit of code got rid of the error. However, I’m not crazy about mucking about in the Semiologic plugin files. There may be an easier way to do it – but I haven’t had a chance to play with it.

So, if you’re using Semiologic Pro and want this functionality – you’ve got some work ahead of you. With other themes that are less involved, you’ll probably be just fine. All in all, Customize Your Community is a really useful plugin for extending your brand.Customize Your Community (CYC) Wordpress Plugin

Is there a plugin to automatically add little file type icons to my posts?

Yes, you can use the File Icons plugin. This is a nice little plugin that adds icons next to your file download links in your posts and pages. You can assign specific file icons to specific file types and it comes with over 700 icons!

• If you have a Semiologic themed site, you’ll want to use #main
• For a Revolution site, you’ll want to use: #wrap or #content (#wrap will get all the content areas, #content will get only the main content area on pages/posts but not sidebars or other areas.)

The All in One SEO plugin for Wordpress makes optimizing your site’s Title and Meta tags simple. This popular plugin gets thousands of downloads per day.

Search engines and best practices expect certain things of our Title tags and Meta description tags.

Title Tag (that’s the part that appears at the top of the browser window)

These should be descriptive of the content of the page, should include your important keywords for that page, and if you think about it, should be written to look appealing.

Meta Description (this is hidden in the source of your page)

<meta name="keywords" content="seo, wordpress, plugins,
all in one seo, title tag, meta description,
 meta keyword, on page optimization" />
<meta name="description" content="A look at the
Wordpress plugin: All in One SEO" />

These should be different for each page, after all, each page has different content, right? (If not, then you’ve got other things to think about) This description is often used by the search engines as the snippet about your site in the search results.

All in One SEO does this for you and gives you the ability manually over ride the settings, so you get just the information you want, where you need it.