Jason & Susan

We’ve been trying to figure out a more efficient and simple way to manage our photo gallery. Previously, all the photos were posted on page templates instead of posts. Every time a new photo page was created, we’d have to manually create a link in our photo gallery index page.

Now, the photo gallery page is powered by Extended Live Archive plugin. All we need to do now is designate photogallery as the category for all the photos and they will automatically show up on the photo gallery page, organized by year, month, or tags.

The advantage of using posts instead of page templates for photos is that we can tag the posts so that they are easily searchable. Also, they will show up on the “On This Day” section at the bottom of every page.

The trouble with using Extended Live Archive plugin for the photo gallery is that we already used the plugin for our archive page. The plugin can be used only once, not twice, and there’s only one global configuration for the plugin. So either the plugin shows all the categories/posts or it shows only the categories we designate. We couldn’t have one configuration for the archives page and another configuration for the photogallery page (showing only photos). For lack of decent alternative plugins, the only way was to hack the Extended Live Archive plugin. Susan spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to tweak the ELA code so that the plugin can be used two separate ways.

In the end, the only way that worked was to install a previous version of the Extended Live Archive plugin on top of the latest version, change every single function name of the previous version, and install it as a different plugin altogether. It worked, except the previous version isn’t as sophisticated and lacks the tag archive feature. The layout is not as neat and the individual posts don’t line up properly on the right side.

Oh well. Enough hacking for the day.

We transferred all of the photos that were originally on page templates to posts. We’ll have to manually check all the cross-reference links in old posts to make sure they point to the right place.

If anyone knows how to install the newest version of Extended Live Archive twice, or know of another plugin that can generate archive for just one category, organized by year and date, let us know!