With relief, I have finally got Nextgen deactivated out of our WordPress systems. It was a nice plugin, and it should still be once all are fixed. It served us well.
However, I decided that I don’t like the idea of our image management (which is crucial to our business) being dependent on a WordPress plugin. Got the wake-up call after Nextgen went to ver 2 …
I’ve gone back to good old open-source Coppermine, which we use in our non-Wordpress website for many years since 2002 or thereabouts.
We’ve uploaded all our WordPress Nextgen images into Coppermine, and call the images using a php program called cpmfetch to “fetch” the images and show them in WordPress, with a WordPress lightbox plugin to open the thumbs like we used to in Nextgen.
Fast, no additional bloat to WordPress, and our customizations allow us to do more than ever like show only a specific group of images from a big gallery, styling, etc.
We’ve created a shortcode using WordPress plugin Shortcode Exec PHP to simplify things and make it look like a nextgen shortcode (or even name it nextgen if we wanted to).
Coppermine and cpmfetch can be daunting, so it’s not for everyone. It may even be considered archaic, but it’s proven stable and since all the basics are taken care of, hardly are there any updates (but still with a strong group of volunteer support).
Anyway, all the best in your search …
