What a wonderful plugin – leaving Nexgen in the dirt

I was handed a WP install with the Nexgen gallery (free) in use – and couldn’t believe why anyone would use such a clunky and bloated plugin!

Here’s what I hated about Nexgen – and why I love this plugin:

• Nexgen stores pictures in a separate folder (meaning what you use for a gallery can’t be used as picture elsewhere – you’ll have to upload it again). This plugin uses the regular media library (and can even have its admin menu entries appear under the media library – with a free extension).
• Nexgen displays very ugly galleries by default. Sure, I could spend hours coding my own templates, but then I wouldn’t download a plugin for the job. The worst is that Nexgen forces a page reload for flipping through a slide show – so if your slideshow is down on the page, the user has to scroll down again after switching to a new image…!!! (unless you use their horrid flash plugin – which then however means you can’t really configure anything about how the picture description is displayed). Plus Nexgen stores absolute paths to its templates – meaning once you move your site to a different folder or a new domain, all your content is messed-up…
  This plugin offers beautiful, highly configurable and very functional slideshow views right out of the box (with more available through free plugins). And they are very developer-friendly by offering you even a generator to bake your own extension template with just a mouse click.
• The best of it all is that FooGallery even provided a free migrator tool to import all of the existing Nexgen galleries.

I have to say I’m deeply impressed about your plugin:

• it simply just does an outstanding job
• it is VERY feature rich
• it offers a slick user interface (Nexgen’s will haunt me in my nightmares!)
• it uses great coding practices
• it is clearly written by a great team with the right atttitude – open extensible architecture, and a non-aggressive non-deceptive business model: provide an AWESOME feature package for free and then offer some non-obtrusive pro extensions.

I can’t recommend this plugin enough! Thank you guys for your wonderful work – people like you make the WordPress ecosystem a much better place.