Can MLA Do This?

Thanks for your questions and the link to an example page. The short answer is “yes, with a bit of work.”

I had a look at the HTML markup used for the “New Orleans Saints Pictures and Images” example page. The “grid view” is a straightforward HTML unnumbered list (ul). You could use an MLA custom markup template to generate similar HTML output.

The visual appearance is achieved by a number of CSS styles, most of which start with “g-“. These are supplied by the Gallery3 plugin., I believe. The stylesheets contain several references to, for example, “Gallery 3 Clean Canvas Theme Screen Styles” and file names like themes/clean_canvas/css/clean/screen_candy.css. If you can find all the relevant styles and create a stylesheet in your theme or an MLA style template you should be able to get the same appearance.

The content and “meta-data” can be added to your MLA markup template. The specifics depend on where it comes from, custom fields, taxonomies, etc. At worst you might have to use some of the hooks provided by the [mla_gallery] shortcode to compose the data you need.

In summary, it can be done but it will require some development effort. Without access to your site’s theme and plugins it is hard to be more specific. I will leave this topic unresolved for now in case you have more specific questions on this project.

Thanks for your update and the additional details.

My “custom fields and taxonomies” comment was a general response to your “meta-data” requirement. Your example page shows “Views:” and “By:”, and these must be stored somewhere. Custom fields are a standard WordPress feature and MLA lets you manage and use them in many ways. Have a look at the custom: prefix in the “Field-level substitution parameters” section of the Settings/Media library Assistant Documentation tab. You can see an example of their use in the “A table-based Style and Markup template example” Documentation section, which also shows custom Style and Markup templates.

Taxonomies are another standard WordPress feature. You can use them to assign terms to your images and then create galleries filtered by term so you can add images to your Media Library and automatically display them on the appropriate posts/pages.

In addition to the simple template example in the Documentation there have been several support topics regarding custom templates. Here is one topic, which links to additional topics along the lines you need:

List items

Based on your example page, here’s a rough idea of the kind of template (untested) you could use:

Style template:

<style type='text/css'>
.g-item .last_in_row {
    left: 0px;
    top: 0px;
    position: relative;
}
</style>

Markup template
Open part:

<ul class="ui-helper-clearfix" id="g-album-grid">

Row open part:
(leave this part empty)

Item part:

<li class="g-item g-photo" id="g-item-id-[+attachment_ID+]" style="height: 216px; ">
<div class="g-valign" style="margin-top: 0px;">
[+link+]
<h2><span class="g-photo"></span>
<a>[+caption+]</a>
</h2>
<ul class="g-metadata">
<li>Views: [+custom:Views+]</li>
<li>By: [+custom:By+]</li>
</ul>
</div>
</li>

Row close part:
(leave this part empty)

Close part:

</ul>

I’m sure that needs work, but it will give you the general idea. I’ve assumed that your meta-data is stored in WordPress custom fields, but the template can be adapted to other sources if you know where the data is.

I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have problems or further questions regarding the above suggestions. I’m happy to work with you on the specifics of your application.

Every application I have encountered has used standard posts/pages to contain their [mla_gallery] shortcodes. I have not seen an application that uses a custom post type.

Some applications have put [mla_gallery] in a widget. MLA provides the “MLA Text” widget for this purpose.

A few applications have used a do_shortcode() function call to execute [mla_gallery] in their PHP template files.

Please post any additional questions that come up as you proceed. Good luck!