Default sorting of galleries

@tiku – There is currently no persistent option to sort the galleries by ID in descending order but you are more than welcome to add your thoughts and ideas on this as a Feature Request here: https://nextgen-gallery.com/feature-voting/

Also, we do not generally recommend modifying the plugin’s core code as it is not update proof and we cannot support custom modifications to the code.

– Cais.

Hi Cais,

I fully understand that you discourage modifying the sources. If I were you, I would do the same. But I also try to to give the authors on our site as much comfort as possible.
If I change a WordPress plugin, I document very detailed what I change and why I did this. If a plugin is about to be updated, I check whether it contains customizations. If it does, I test whether these customizations still work with the new version and if they do, I re-apply them after updating the live system. Quite some work, but it’s okay for me and I also keep the number of customizations low. Usually I do only small changes like fixing some warnings, change some defaults…

Changing the default sort order seemed like a very small change. I managed to modify the URL that is opened when clicking the menu item, but then NextGen told me that I would not have access rights to this page.
I’ve sent a feature request.

Thanks
TiKu

@tiku – Thanks! If you have a PR/patch for this change / idea we would be more than happy to review it as well.

– Cais.

If I get it working, I’ll post my modifications here. So far I managed only to modify the link to the same link that you get if you sort by descending ID manually. But for some reason this caused the mentioned problem with the missing rights, so it was unusable and I reverted it.

@tiku – Thanks for the update, please continue.

– Cais.

The author of Tablepress tells me that the oldest first default is a feature of WordPress which is why so many plugins are like that. This is a fundamental blight and a monumentally bad bit of software design. Unbelievable that anyone thought it a good idea. I can only presume that it was easier to design it that way and laziness prevailed.
For sites like ours which are added to daily, with pages and pages of galleries, thousands of posts, it’s a huge annoyance.

Also this is already on the feature requests list. It doesn’t get many votes presumably because few sites have large numbers of galleries.

@digbymaass – Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

– Cais.

I’ve found a solution. Actually it is quite easy. In file products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/ngglegacy/admin/admin.php search for function show_menu(). In this function search for case "nggallery-manage-gallery" :. Within this case, you’ll find a line $ngg->manage_page = new nggManageGallery ();. Right before this line insert these four lines:

if(!isset($_GET['orderby'])) {
        $_GET['orderby'] = 'gid';
        $_GET['order'] = 'desc';
}

Regards
TiKu

@tiku – Thanks for sharing your work-around!

– Cais.

TiKu, we may not support persisting the sort order of that page but bookmarking it in your browser would save you a step.

Perfect. Is there a way to use that in functions.php?

Benjamin. Why on earth wouldn’t you support newest first? Or is that not what you mean?

At least give us an option to set it that way.

@digbymaass – It would still be best for you to start your own topic(s) to address your specific questions … please do.

Thanks!

– Cais.

I’ve checked in an update that adds two filters to control this: ngg_manage_galleries_items_order and ngg_manage_galleries_items_orderby. They’ll be controllable with the following:

add_filter('ngg_manage_galleries_items_orderby', 'set_ngg_orderby');
add_filter('ngg_manage_galleries_items_order', 'set_ngg_order');
}

function set_ngg_order($order) {
    return 'DESC';
}

function set_ngg_orderby($orderby) {
    return 'gid';
}

This is the first update post-NextGen 2.1.7 so while it will get released there may be a wait before it is out.

The following change to nextgen-gallery/products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/ngglegacy/admin/manage-galleries.php can be applied however:

-    $order = ( isset ( $_GET['order'] ) && $_GET['order'] == 'desc' ) ? 'DESC' : 'ASC';
-    $orderby = ( isset ( $_GET['orderby'] ) && ( in_array( $_GET['orderby'], array('gid', 'title', 'author') )) ) ? $_GET['orderby'] : 'gid';
+    if (!empty($_GET['order']) && in_array($_GET['order'], array('DESC', 'ASC')))
+               $order = $_GET['order'];
+       else
+               $order = apply_filters('ngg_manage_galleries_items_order', 'ASC');
+
+       if (!empty($_GET['orderby']) && in_array($_GET['orderby'], array('gid', 'title', 'author')))
+               $orderby = $_GET['orderby'];
+       else
+               $orderby = apply_filters('ngg_manage_galleries_items_orderby', 'gid');

The syntax of this can’t be right:

add_filter(‘ngg_manage_galleries_items_orderby’, ‘set_ngg_orderby’);
add_filter(‘ngg_manage_galleries_items_order’, ‘set_ngg_order’);
}

function set_ngg_order($order) {
return ‘DESC’;
}

function set_ngg_orderby($orderby) {
return ‘gid’;
}

For a start there’s a surplus } that crashes the site. With this removed it doesn’t work anyway!