Gallery Extended

Gallery Extended 2.0 allows you to treat user submitted images like putty on your site. You can throw a piece of putty at just about anything and it will stick. So too with images on your site using GX2.

GX2 treats images like putty because an uploaded image can be associated with any piece of EE content.

Every piece of EE content, from blog entries, to comments, to member accounts, to ratings, to freeform entries... all have unique entry ids. But their ids are unique only within their type. Comments all have unique ids with respect to one another, and so do blog entries.

But a blog entry could have the same id number as a comment. So you have to tell GX2 what kind of content you are sticking an image to. You don't have to be strict. GX2 just needs to record an entry id and type for an image in order to be able to pull it up for you again on a template. You record an id and type combo at upload time and use that same combo again to call the image on various pages of your site.

GX2 also allows users to upload multiple images with one form submission. There's no limit to the number of images uploaded, except for how much data your server can handle at a time and how patient your users are. You be the judge.

GX2, of course, builds on the native EE photo gallery module functionality. So it will resize non-gif images and all that. All of your settings will be respected.

All images uploaded using GX2 become entries in your photo gallery module. You can record title, caption, custom field, categories and all that.

GX2 now includes a handy Image Tab for the Publish/Edit page in the CP to allow for easy image uploads and automatic Entry assigning!

Note: The native EE Photo Gallery module uses many variable names that other EE functions use. Since GX2 allows you to integrate gallery entries more closely with other site content, variables can collide. We recommend that you get into the habit of running GX2 functions through templates that you embed into your main page template. First, it's just smart. Second, you avoid trouble. Remember that you can and should pass variables from your main template across to your embeded template using native EE functionality.
Note: For those of you upgrading from GX1 to GX2, make sure that before uploading the GX2 files, you deinstall the old GX1 files. You will not lose any data. Once you deinstall the old module in the EE CP, you can upload the GX2 files and install those.