Running a photoclub website with many active members there was a need to enhance the standard functionality provided by WordPress and by several additional WordPress plugins. In particular we organize our images, galleries and albums by means of the plugins NextGEN Gallery and NextGEN Gallery Plus.
However, handling of some 100+ galleries and some thousand images uploaded by all the members called for additional functionality regarding tracking individual image uploads and image movements (copy/move) between galleries, finding images across galleries, as well as organizing and referencing comments about individual images.
To help organize our club website I implemented some plugins in a ‚quick and dirty‘ approach, mainly addressing the areas
- logging user activities of image handling (uploading images, copy / move / delete images, create / update / delete galleries and/or albums)
- providing a front end search functionality for images
- providing a voting functionality on dedicated image galleries
- organizing comments for individual images (NextGEN Gallery Plus enables comments for individual images, but does not provide working links and widgets for such comments)
With more time available I started redefining these plugins in a solid maintainable way to provide them to the WordPress community.
The first plugin I implemented this way was Simple History NGG Loggers. This is an extension of the nice plugin Simple History which provides loggers for all kinds of activities on a website. My plugin adds dedicated loggers for user activites regarding NextGEN Gallery image, gallery and album handling. This plugin is already available on the WordPress.org plugin directory.
The next plugin I implemented was NextGEN NGG Smart Image Search. This plugin provides a smart search functionality for images across selectable gallery and album collections. The searchterm is searched for in title, description, filename and tags of images. Search functionality is configurable differently for public and private searches. This plugin is already available too on the WordPress.org plugin directory.