When is 1.9.24 to be released?

I second that!

I would suggest anyone with these types of requests look into contributing to the project on BitBucket. This is a community support plugin, not a commercial plugin like NGG 2.0, and no one is getting paid to make updates to the plugin.

The best way to help ensure NextCellent gallery publishes updates on a regular schedule and stays alive is to help take some of the burden of of the main developer by reporting and fixing these bugs you are running into by submitting an issue report on this support forum and on the Git repo forking and a submitting a pull request with proposed code changes that resolve your issues.

https://bitbucket.org/wpgetready/nextcellent

Even if you are not a great programmer, simply reporting issues with steps to reproduce them is a great help and benefit to the project. As it saves others a ton of time and effort tracking down bugs.

Well, I agree mostly, but also want to remind that:
– NextCellent Gallery only exists because NGG after upgrading the whole architecture into a new “better” one had serious problems to get the previously very solid and bug-free plugin a mess with lots of bugs.
– NGG as such is a free plugin like NextCellent; from the users’ perspective what counts is how well the plugin works. I maintain some sites using the Basic NGG 2.0.xx currently without any real problems.

I also think some of the recent NextCellent bugs are somewhat related to the same problem NGG 2.0 faced: broadening functionality while at the same time “cleaning” the very well working code – maybe because of WordPress development. If I’m totally wrong here I would like the plugin developers correct me. Running an old plugin version due to any bugs in more recent releases is not ok.

First of all, let me say this: I’m the one responsible for the bugs in 1.9.22, and I’m very sorry for that ??

Secondly, what @chaoix said is completely right ??

Also, let me point a few things out myself:

1. While both NextCellent and NGG are free, NextCellent is basically a side project. Fernando (the official developer) has a real job, and that takes up most of his time. I think it’s only natural that if you’ve spent 8+ hours on coding, you don’t want to get home and do more of the same. I’m also don’t have that much free times on my hands, so that’s the reason why there sometimes is a big delay between updates.
2. However, you are right: bugs like the ones in 1.9.22 and the unresolved one regarding the admin css should have not happened and should not happen in the future anymore. However, testing NextCellent takes a lot of time (see 1) and is difficult sometimes, see the next point.
3. Let me tell you this: the NextCellent code base is pretty much a mess. Almost none of the code has proper documentation. Best practices are often ignored, or implemented in different ways across the plugin. This makes doing things, especially bugfixes, a pain in the ass.
4. That’s why sometimes it’s necessary or just faster the refactor code: write it again to ensure it will continue working in the feature. However, this is a long process: the new code must be bug free, and we need to preserve compatibility.
5. However, this is still completely different from what NGG did: they completely rewrote the code, implementing a new PHP-framework. In my opinion this is little too much: we don’t really need it, and it makes things a lot more difficult for people not familiar with the framework. So, rest assured, that is not going to happen. ??
6. To finish, the code may be working, but definitely not working very well. There are a lot of instances where the same action is done by different parts of the code, and it is really unpredictive in general. You never really know what will happen.

Also, please note: I’m not the official developer for NextCellent, WPGetReady is. Therefore what I said is my opinion, not his.

@niknetniko: I fully understand your statement, being one of the contributors to NextCellent as a translator.
I also know very well the status of NGG as Alex Rabe left it: working, and working well, but code is what you get after years of development as a single “hobbyist” if you like. It is clear that for larger future functions some reverse engineering is needed to get it all working.

But, the fact is that current NGG 2.0.69 works pretty well without any paid extra plugins and has gained a lot of new users. If NextCellent (being a fork of NGG) will not get the problems away pretty soon, many users may abandon this great effort of WPGetReady and yourself. That would really be a shame as there are still features in NextCellent that NGG’s latest versions do not have (e.g. Imagebrowser with EXIF data, rotation of images working in all environments…).

Hope you guys find soon some solutions (and time) to fix what needs to be fixed as there are most possibly not many others who would have time to dig into the code and make it better.

@vesat

Don’t get me wrong: I fully agree we should release the fixes soon. However, I don’t know when that will be; it depends on when WPGetReady finds the time.

That’s all I wanted to say, really ??