We have a bunch of UI changes in NextGEN Gallery we’re making, like a new Add Gallery button. But we’re slowly migrating to it as to not confuse the 1.3 million users of NextGEN Gallery.

We’re also adding Yoast SEO integration, the API for our upcoming Lightroom plugin and new placeholder watermarks.

Read the full announcement here.

There’s a little trick that enables you to include Font Awesome icons as your social media follow feature on your website. More specifically, in a widget area. Take a look at my photography website and you’ll notice the icons in the header and footer.

A quick examplanation for how this works is as follows. With Font Awesome used on a website, you can include some basic HTML like and it will display a Facebook icon.

However, it will match your normal text styling. So if your text is 14px then the icon will be around the same size. It will also match the text color, so if it’s black then the font icon will be black.

But if you want to style your icons with colors and different sizes then it requires a little more work. Specifically, some CSS work.

The snippets below are exactly what I am using on my own website. You’re welcome to copy/paste and modify them to fit your own needs.

The HTML

Place this in a widget where you want the icons to display.

The CSS

Place this CSS in the Custom CSS area within the Photocrati “Theme Options” panel.

If you’d like to take this to new levels, check out the documentation and available icons from the Font Awesome website.

If you are a NextGEN Gallery user and not a Plus/Pro user then don’t worry. We built the Font Awesome script inside of NextGEN Gallery. You can take advantage of the feature by installing my NextGEN Font Awesome On plugin. All it does is enables the use of Font Awesome all the time, even without a galley on a page or Plus/Pro active.

If you are not using NextGEN Gallery then you can browse the WordPress directory for a Font Awesome plugin to use. If activate NextGEN Gallery while another Font Awesome plugin is active then NextGEN will utilize the Font Awesome script called by the other plugin. Nice, huh?

The same is true for your WordPress site. With the click of a mouse (or the swipe of a finger on a touch screen) your hard-won visitors will be gone if you don’t give them a good reason to stick around – and that means creating a great design that lets your beautiful image galleries and slideshows shine.

The first step is choosing the right theme (you learn all about installing and customizing a variety themes, including Photocrati’s theme) during my free creativeLIVE course August 5-6).

After you get your theme set up, you can add loads of other features by installing and activating Plugins. In the world of WordPress there are now 26,000 themes (and counting). If you’re a photographer, you should definitely start with the NextGen Gallery plugin (now also owned by Photocrati). With more than 7.5 million downloads, it’s one of the most popular plugins in the world of WordPress.

Here are 7 other plugins I recommend for anyone with a WordPress site:

1) WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast

Optimization helps you stay ahead of the game. This plugin provides an easy platform to optimize content, the titles of your images, meta descriptions, and more.

2) AddThis Social Media Sharing

This single string of code is easy to install and lets your visitors share your content easily. It’s a non-intrusive, data driven tool. It’s especially great on mobile devices.

3) WP Super Cache

In technical terms, this plugin generates HTML files pushed directly by Apache without the dealing with PHP Scripts. This means that you can use this plugin to speed up your site significantly.

4) NextGEN Gallery

This is the most popular WordPress gallery plugin, and one of the most popular plugins of any kind. It includes multiple gallery styles, albums and lightboxes. Recently updated with an improved user experience and a premium version with additional styles and an exclusive lightbox and all fully responsive.

5) LightBox Plus Colorbox

There so many light box plugins too choose from, but this is one of the most popular options. (worth noting that the Photocrati theme has a lightbox built-in)

6) Regenerate Thumbnails

One of the hardest parts of building a great site is having the time to make it great. That said, you need all the time savers you can get. this plugin lets you regenerate the thumbnails for all your image attachments no matter if you’ve altered them previously.

7) Backup Buddy

Arguably the most popular option for creating regular backups of your blog, this plugin can also help you move a WordPress site to a new server (which si a lot more complicated than most WordPress novices realize).

Bonus tip: Gravatar: It’s not a plugin, but create a profile at gravatar.com and your profile photo will appear next to your name when you post comments on your site, or anyone else’s who supports Gravatars, which is most sites.

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Janine Warner is the author of 25 books, including Web Sites For Dummies, Mobile Web Design For Dummies, and Social Media Design For Dummies (Jan. 2014). If you want to learn more about all of Janine’s WordPress tips and tricks, watch her free online creativeLIVE course August 5-6.

Special Note: On the first day of her creativeLIVE course, Janine will be interviewing Photocrati’s very own Scott Wyden Kivowitz!

Read about NextGEN Gallery 2.0, it’s updates and known issues.

With the new NextGEN Gallery 2.0 also came NextGEN Pro, a premium version of the plugin that includes a variety of enhanced galleries that you see in the Photocrati theme. However, if you look at the NextGEN Pro demos, you will notice some things that are not in the Photocrati theme. For example, the Masonry Gallery and the Pro Lightbox.

Read about NextGEN Pro and what’s included

As we mentioned in the acquisition article, we plan to replace the existing Photocrati gallery system with NextGEN Pro. The migration will be seamless and aside from an aesthetic change, you will not know that you are using NextGEN Pro. The merging of Photocrati and NextGEN Pro will be free for all up-to-date Photocrati members. That means if you purchase the theme before we launched the recurring structure then you will have access to the update automatically. If you are part of the recurring structure, then you will have to renew (when the time comes) to get the updated theme with NextGEN Pro integrated.

If you’d like to take advantage of the Pro Lightbox and Pro Masonry display types, you’re more than welcome to purchase NextGEN Pro now for $39 and cancel your membership when Photocrati 5.0 is released, which will encompass all of NextGEN Pro’s functionality. When you switch from NextGEN Pro to Photocrati 5.0, your galleries will continue to work and all data will be preserved.

I know that’s a lot to take in all at once, but we want to make sure you understand that this is a very huge milestone for us and for the Photocrati community. We have a lot planned, and we take your feedback and feature requests very seriously. In fact, the majority of NextGEN Gallery 2.0 was from feature requests by users.

Without further ado, I want to share a note from Erick Danzer, the CEO of Photocrati.

Hi fellow Photocrati & NextGEN Gallery users,

After over a year of hard word, NextGEN Gallery 2.0 is now available in the WordPress plugin directory. Thank you to all the beta testers who provided useful feedback and bug reports. This is an uncommon update, and I just wanted to add some personal notes.

WHAT’S INCLUDED

NextGEN 2.0 includes a completely reworked interface for the NextGEN options panel and for adding galleries to pages and posts. The new Attach to Post interface allows you to customize every gallery rather than having global settings that apply to all galleries.

IF YOU HAVE ISSUES?

We recognize this is huge update to NextGEN Gallery. We’ve tested it endlessly, and pushed out betas for public testing. Despite all that, an update of this size and scope is going to produce issues, in part because of the enormously wide diversity of environments in which NextGEN is used (NextGEN will be updated on 100,000 WordPress instances within the first week).

We – and I personally – are very committed to monitoring, responding to, and resolving issues. As always, we’ll try to triage within the support forums to focus on bugs that are either:

a) serious or
b) affecting large number of users

But we’ll be more present in the forums for the next month or two than we generally are to ensure we’re on top of things.

Users should also expect relatively frequent updates in the next month or two as we track down these issues.

You can see other notes on what’s included below.

Thanks very much,

Erick
Founder, Photocrati

For NextGEN Gallery 2.0 support, please visit the WordPress forum. For NextGEN Pro support, there is a support system only available within each user’s account area.

Finally, we’d like to say thank you as well for your feedback and support. We can’t wait to share future updates with you. Please feel free to comment below with more of your feature requests because the road ahead involves you. As always we will take your feature requests and address the most popular ones.

-Scott

Real quick update today. For those Photocrati users that are also using the NextGEN Gallery plugin, this is for you.

Today we announced our first update since acquiring the plugin.

For full details and instructions, visit the NextGEN Gallery 1.9.5 announcement.

Thanks for the support,

The Photocrati Team

We’re thrilled to announce to the Photocrati community some big news that has been in the works for nearly six months: Photocrati has acquired the NextGEN Gallery WordPress plugin!

As most of you know, NextGEN Gallery is the single most popular gallery management plugin for WordPress with over 5 million downloads. The acquisition is part of our effort to consolidate the best WordPress solutions for photographers under one roof.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR PHOTOCRATI USERS?

Needless to say, the acquisition has big implications for the community of Photocrati users.

Best of Both Worlds. Our ultimate goal is to bring you the best of NextGEN and Photocrati, plus lots of improvements on both, all as a seamless part of the Photocrati theme. We are currently working on Photocrati 5.0. This major update will replace the existing Photocrati Gallery systems with a new system that merges both NextGEN and Photocrati.

NextGEN Gallery Management. NextGEN will act as the underlying engine for gallery management in the theme. That means Photocrati users will automatically have access to lots of new functionality, including centralized gallery management, the ability to custom crop thumbnails, and the ability to apply watermarks to images, all of which have been popular feature requests within our community. In addition, you will be able to display images using NextGEN-style galleries.

Photocrati Displays & Functionality. We’ll be layering Photocrati-style functionality on top of NextGEN. That means you will still be able to display galleries using Photocrati slideshow, thumbnail, filmstrip, blog-style, and ecommerce style displays.

New and Improved Ecommerce. As part of this project, we’ll also be introducing a more powerful and elegant ecommerce solution with options like the ability to enable ecommerce across all gallery types and to buy and download digital images.

BIG PLANS FOR NEXTGEN TOO!

We’ll also be making some major improvements to NextGEN Gallery itself. For more on our plans with NextGEN, see our announcement on the NextGEN blog here: Plans for NextGEN.

IS THERE A TIME FRAME FOR ALL OF THIS?

The integration of NextGEN and Photocrati represents a huge project. Our software engineering team has already been working on this for months, and we plan to move into testing phase in mid-summer. We’re refraining from committing to any dates for a final launch since we just don’t know how long certain components of the project will take.

We know you’ll be looking forward to the update, and we will keep you posted on the progress via our blog and email updates.

To ensure that we get through this project as quickly as possible, we also want to let the community know that we’ll be avoiding, if possible, intermediate updates between now and the launch of Photocrati 5.0.

WE’RE HIRING AND LOOKING FOR BETA TESTERS

As part of this expansion, we’re hiring for a range of positions over the coming six months, including software engineers, happiness engineers, a systems administrator and a webmaster. If you are interested, please check out our jobs page.

We also plan to introduce a beta testing program. If you are interested in being a beta tester, please contact us.

We’ll have more news soon. If you are not already, please stay informed by joining us on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.