Do Your Visual Portfolio with Wordpress

Use Wordpress for your portfolio or gallery

Doing your visual portfolio with Wordpress is totally easy thanks to a fabulous gallery plugin called NextGEN Gallery by Alex Rabe.  Creating and managing an online gallery used to be a pain since it was hard to get something professional-looking without a lot of hand-coded HTML and Javascript, or FLash - either way requiring a programmer or interactive designer and a large price tag.  Now, thanks to great open source CMS platforms like Wordpress, the open API architecture of Flickr, and the dedicated craftsmanship of Wordpress community plugin development, any Joe Schlimeel can self-promote their work with style.  And it's free.  :)

NextGEN Gallery does pretty much everything

NextGEN is a full-service plugin that handles every facet of making an image gallery from upload to display type. Embedding galleries into your pages or posts with NextGEN is a cinch using a common bracket format like [gallery=ID] . But even if this looks complicated, don't despair. There is ample documentation including an FAQ, Forums, and samples.  Here's a quick tour of the plugin's abilities and customization options:

  • manage multiple galleries and albums (sub-galleries)
  • change image dimensions and resizing
  • sort images dynamically
  • add watermarks for copyright protection
  • choose from a range of display methods
  • control editing permissions (you can actually designate access roles to different tasks for multiple users!)

As you cans see, you really get a high level of control with this plugin.

Look&Feel

NextGEN really understands the need to have cool display functionality, and has incorporated support for the sleekest modal window technologies available on the web from basic slideshows to Airtight Interactive's (sweet) suit of "simple, unobtrusive and usable" gallery tools.  See it in action:

  • slideshows (demo)
  • Lightbox (demo)
  • Thickbox (demo)
  • Highslide (demo)
  • SimpleViewer (demo)
  • TiltViewer, w/ Flickr Support (demo)
  • Post Card Viewer (demo)
  • Polaroid (demo)

You'll notice that there is even Flickr support for TiltViewer. Considering the increasing popularity of Flickr, you can expect more Flickr fun in the future for NextGEN.

Beyond NextGEN

If you really really want to use Flickr with the the SimpleViewer visualization you can! Try Josh Gerdes' SimpleFlickr plugin.

PS

NextGEN is currently in active development and compatible with the most recent Wordpress update (2.5.1).  

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Created on: 09 Jun 16:32

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