Life after NextCellent …

Well, the time has come for me to (regretfully) move on from NextCellent.
It (and its predecessor) have given me good service over the last decade, but there are too many reasons now.
Many thanks to those who kept it alive for so long.

Obviously, WordPress’ move to block structures doesn’t help. That would take a huge amount of coding to resolve.
And the old code is starting to creak – throwing more php errors and clogging up my log file.
The main reason, though is that I want to set up a WooCommerce shop, and that works well with WP’s native Media Library.

For context, I’m a photographer, and I’m looking to run a portfolio site. This has a number of galleries which are managed over time (rather than one-off posts), and doesn’t really lend itself to the basic native WP library.
So I like my images to be organised into a folder structure.
Also … Gallery blocks concern me. Structures (images, sequences) are held on a post-by-post basis, which means a change to the block could potentially mess things up. I feel safer with database structures.

So I’ve put together a post outlining how I’ll be structuring my galleries going forward, in case anyone else is wondering about options.
(Hint – it involves free plugins).

You can read it at https://critical-focus.net/blog/2022/05/and-its-goodbye-to-nextcellent-with-regret/

All the best,
Drew