shoddy implementation of Gallery plugin

I am using this plugin in a site I’m working on. When you install it correctly and add pictures correctly from the start, you get a simple gallery that looks good, and the images expand quickly when clicked for a nice looking and nice working enlargement.

The problems come when you don’t do everything right at first, or when you want to change something. I reinstalled a clean WordPress for testing, and did some more checking. The results left me even more convinced of my original description: SHODDY.

1. After playing around a while with the shortcode variations and the download-links checkbox, I ran into so many glitches that I tried to deactivate and reactivate the plugin. After deactivating, I should have seen the shortcode [print_gllry id=185] in my page, unprocessed. Instead the shortcode was still getting processed, and I received this: “Fatal error: Call to undefined function the_excerpt_max_charlength()..” This plugin doesn’t even deactivate itself cleanly.

2. Before trying to deactivate, I ran into various glitches. In particular, I changed my shortcode usage from normal gallery view to “display=short” view. Worked great! Then I changed back to the normal view, but still got the “display=short” view. So I tried to create a new page with the normal-view shortcode and STILL got the “display=short” view. UGH! That’s when I tried to deactivate and reactivate.

3. Somewhere in all of this I tried to get download links to appear. I never succeeded, possibly because of these other issues.

4. Meanwhile, the documentation for the plugin is scattered all over the place: on its wordpress.org home page in the first three tabs, and here and there in the gallery options and in the gallery-edit page.

My overall feeling is:

• terrific results when it works
• shoddy and buggy implementation
• terrible documentation

It’s a shame, considering that this could be an elegant, simple way to make a simple gallery.

Hello BestWebSoft,

Regarding the bug related to deactivating the Gallery plugin, your answer noted ways that I might have avoided it. I would have preferred if your answer had said “we fixed the bug.” Once a WordPress plugin is deactivated, it should no longer have any effect whatsoever on the website — this is important.

Regarding the problems related to “display=short” and “download links”, I removed the Gallery plugin a while ago, so I can’t reproduce and describe those problems again. However, as my previous message noted, I was using a clean WordPress installation to retest the glitches that I complained about earlier — and they still happened even when using this clean install.

Your response didn’t mention my complaint about documentation. As examples, let’s use the issues in this message. The Gallery plugin has features for “display=short” and “download links”, but it doesn’t describe what these features are supposed to do. In my case, I just decided to test them and see. As noted in my previous message: In the first case, it did something nice, but then stopped working. In the second case, I never saw it do anything. The whole experience would have been better and simpler if these (and other) features were described better, and if the documentation were organized better.

I like this Gallery plugin and that’s why I took the time to criticize it. It’s simpler to use than many others, and still it does a lot. As I said in my previous message, “this could be an elegant, simple way to make a simple gallery.” But its many glitches and bugs make it impossible for me to use it and rely on it. Please test it thoroughly, feature by feature, and fix it! Thank you.