One of the main reasons I left Xaraya behind and moved onto WordPress was the time Xaraya was chewing up just to get up and running. Before changing over I looked around to see what photo gallery options were available. When I saw that gallery2 had been successfully integrated into WordPress and was actively supported and developed my mind was pretty much made up to change.

It didn’t take me long and I soon had WordPress and Gallery2 up and running in there own rights. Next was the integration of the two, which to my surprise relatively painless and quick. This was done through a WordPress plugin called gallery2 that synchronizes the user accounts and privilege levels and also has an embedment page that encoded the gallery2 pages within the WordPress theme.

My only real hurdle was adding a link to the embedded page. I could have hard coded a link into the theme I am using but that sort of defeats the whole reason for having a CMS and means hard coding that link into every theme I use in the future. After much digging around and trying out of various plugins I found a plugin called gallery2 which allows you to add a redirect to any link or article through the custom fields tag. So I created a page called photos and added a custom field to point towards the embedded page php.

Walla, one gallery2 install integrated into WordPress. Well actually I still need to modify the html/css of the sidebar widget so it displays random thumbnails a little better, but that is a job for latter on down the track.

Check out our photo gallery by following the link at the top of the page or the one in the Sidebar / Pages / Photos.