Smashing WordPress: Beyond The Blog

Chapter 14. FUN WITH IMAGES

It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Or maybe it speaks a thousand words, I'm not sure. The point is that an image can tell a story a lot faster than text can. This isn't to say that images are always preferred over text; I'm pretty sure you can agree that isn't the case. It is no secret, however, that images and text work extremely well together. Other than just spicing things up, an image can also help tell a story and (literally) illustrate a point.

Some sites use more images than others, but most sites are better off whenever they do something thought-through with their galleries and illustrations. This chapter is about displaying images in a WordPress site, beyond the traditional inclusion of illustrative points or inspiring scenery in your posts and pages. It is more about galleries, presentation, and photo-sharing services, not to mention the small matter of actually setting up WordPress image management in a way that makes sense.

Working with Image Galleries

Ever since WordPress 2.5, there has been support for the [gallery] shortcode and the possibilities it brings. What [gallery] does really is output uploaded images in a clickable thumbnail grid. Then you can let your visitors see a larger version of the image, either in your theme's design, or the original file itself. The former is called the attachment page, since that's what images are: attachments to blog posts. This built-in functionality should cover most of the needs you ...