Inserting a NextGen gallery or slideshow in a custom field

I’m working on a project where I’m using custom fields to display NextGen galleries and slideshows separately from Wordpress’s main page content (it’s an unusual layout - I’ll post a link here once it’s ready for viewing). Searching for help led to info on using custom fields to set parameters for the galleries, which wasn’t what I wanted, and then I found this solution, which almost worked but not quite (it displayed some unwanted text).

Here’s how I eventually did it:

Install and activate the NextGen plugin. Create a gallery, add images and configure the options. Full instructions here: http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/.

Then:

  1. On the page on which you want the gallery to be displayed, create a custom field called gallery and, in the value box, enter gallery=1 (enclosed in square brackets!) or slideshow=1,560,280 (choose your own parameters) or whichever tag you want (polaroid, singlepic, album - see the gallery plugin page for options). Click update.
  2. In your theme’s page.php file (or whichever template file is relevant to your needs - I’m using pages), insert the following in the place where you want the gallery to appear:
    <?php $gallery = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'gallery', true); ?>
    <?php
    $gal = $gallery;
    $gal = apply_filters('the_content', $gal );
    echo $gal;
    ?>
  3. Add the following to your theme’s stylesheet:
    .post-meta {
    list-style-type: none;
    }
     
    .post-meta-key {
    display: none;
    }
  4. Play with the stylesheet and template file further to position your gallery where you want it. I created a “picturebox” div to contain mine.
  5. Note that you can now display different galleries on different pages by changing each page’s “gallery” custom field value.

One Response to “Inserting a NextGen gallery or slideshow in a custom field”

  1. Ricardo says:

    Excelent! Thanks so much!

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