The following project is for customization of the nextGEN Gallery. Ideally, the customization will function as an add-on plugin to the nextGEN Gallery plugin so that future updates of the original nextGEN Gallery will not affect the following functionality:
1. The website has individual project pages (each project page represents a visual art project, a book, a curatorial project, etc)
2. Each individual project page will have a gallery attached to it - I would like to build off the current nextGEN Gallery plugin, keeping the backend functionality basically the same, with a custom gallery layout on the page and a gallery selection option built into the current Media uploader/manager within the page editor to attach a gallery to an individual project page
3. The individual project pages are filed either under an archive page 'The Storage Problem' or a current project page 'Now' - each of these two main pages has a distinct display for its children - the Now page is already set up using the child page loop we talked about earlier: [login to view URL], but The Storage Problem Page is a bit more complicated (see below)
4. Importantly, I would like to have the thumbnails populate on Now Page and The Storage Problem Page directly from the nextGEN gallery associated with the individual project page.
------------PAGE SPEC---------------
A) Individual Project Page(s): Each Individual Project Page is a two column page, with a text description in the left column (populated by the traditional WordPress text area entry for a page) and an image gallery in the right column. I envision a dropdown somewhere in the page editor with which we can associate a gallery previously created with the nextGEN Gallery plugin to the page -- once associated, the appropriate gallery will display in the right column.
In the page, the gallery will layout as a large image with thumbnails in a grid below. When the user clicks on a thumbnail, the larger image is updated to show the image of the thumbnail clicked. Some images will be vertical and some horizontal with a max vertical dimension of 500px and max horizontal dimension of 400px - both dimensions are defined in the nextGEN Gallery Options menu.
See screen shot [login to view URL]
2) The Storage Problem Page: This page lists chronologically all of the individual project pages that are 'archived'. I'm thinking if all of the archived Project Pages are assigned 'The Storage Problem' as their Page Parent, then we can define custom fields in each Project Page, such as 'Description', and 'Year' and then call those fields to get a desired listing for each subpage (similar to the Now page)
The trick is grouping these pages chronologically under date headers such as 2009, 2008, etc. We will use the 'DATE' custom field to check for the existence of dates, create headers chronologically, and then group pages under the appropriate headers. Some dates may use a year span such as 1972-1976, because of this we will only be using the first four characters of the DATE value to determine chronology.
The Storage Problem page has a two column layout, each of which essentially does the same thing - in the left column we'll call certain custom fields, and in the right column we'll only call a Thumbnail.
See screen shot [login to view URL]