"> NextGen Gallery PERMALINKS: The missing instructions
As many of you WordPress users may already know, NextGen gallery is one of the most scalable image gallery plugins available for the WordPress platform. It makes adding an image gallery to a post or page extremely easy and allows for simple image and album organization.
Most of the NextGen features seem to work right out of the box with the exception of the permalinks. I struggled for hours trying to get the permalinks (that are built into NextGen) working and producing SEO friendly url’s, but the instructions given are unclear and were not producing results for me.
When I realized why this was happening and corrected the problem, I wondered why there was not a clear cut explanation of how to accomplish this anywhere that I could find. So without further adieu, here are the instructions:
STEP 1:
Make sure your WORDPRESS (not NextGen) permalinks are set to “Default” (Settings->Permalinks). Click “Save Changes”. This is what was causing me issues. Most WordPress users don’t use the default permalink settings as they don’t produce SEO friendly url’s. My permalink settings were set to “Post name”. The instructions provided by NextGen say nothing about using the “default” setting, only that you must “update” your permalink structure.
Step 2:
In your NextGen Gallery options (Gallery->Options), click the box for “Activate Permalinks”. Do NOT change the gallery slug name away from “nggallery”.
Step 3:
Return to your WordPress permalink settings (Settings->Permalinks), ensure that the box for “default” is checked and click “Save Changes”. This is the updating of your permalink structure that they speak of in the instructions.
Step 4:
Go to the main page of your website and refresh your browser. Now click into the NextGen image galleries you have set up on your website and notice the url’s they produce. Now you will have the name of your gallery populated in the url rather than random numbers.
Step 5:
You will notice that in lieu of a postname, your url’s for other area’s of your website will still be producing id numbers rather than post slugs in the url. This is because you changed your permalink structure to “default”. You can now return to your WordPress permalink settings (Settings->Permalinks) and check the box for “Post name” and click “Save Changes”.
Your new SEO friendly permalinks will look something like this:
/post-slug-name/ngg-album-name/nggallery/ngg-album-name/ngg-gallery-nameThe results may not be the cleanest you are looking for but the permalinks are indeed working now and it is much more SEO friendly than random id numbers.
If NextGen Gallery provided these instructions out of the box, it would make much more sense to people trying to get the permalinks to function. The checking of the “defalut” values box in the WordPress permalink settings is crucial in making this work. It seems so simple yet I could not find this information anywhere.
Hopefully this will save you hours of frustration. Let me know of any questions.
Darko, it has been a year since I published this article. It is possible that the NextGEN team has addressed this issue by now. I have a few builds on 3.5.2 using NextGEN and don’t have any problems. If you want to share your process with me, perhaps I can help. Visit the contact form on the top menu to send me a message. I would be glad to help you.
You really make it apeapr so easy along with your presentation however I to find this matter to be actually one thing which I think I would by no means understand. It kind of feels too complex and extremely large for me. I’m taking a look forward to your subsequent submit, I will try to get the dangle of it!
thanks for this tip, easy to understand instructions.
can you solve this other problem with nextgen i am having? when i click on next to see the next picture the screen refreshes to the top of the page and i have to scroll down to see the gallery, which is annoying.
i tried editing shutter-reloaded.js, this funciton
hideShutter : function() {
by commenting out 2 lines .. but made no difference
hideShutter : function() {
var t = this, D, S;
if ( D = t.I('shDisplay') ) D.parentNode.removeChild(D);
if ( S = t.I('shShutter') ) S.parentNode.removeChild(S);
t.hideTags(true);
/** window.scrollTo(0,t.Top); */window.onresize = t.FS = t.Top = t.VP = null;
/** document.documentElement.style.overflowX = ''; */
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