Huge NextGEN Gallery Milestone & The Road Ahead

nextgen-pro

Huge NextGEN Gallery Milestone & The Road Ahead

It feels like yesterday that Photocrati acquired NextGEN Gallery. Actually it feels like forever! We have been working very hard for over a year now re-designing the free NextGEN Gallery plugin. It’s a plugin that has over 7.5 million downloads, and has been a top 10 most popular WordPress plugin for a long time. Now, we have gone through and made the user experience of the plugin easier for everyone. In addition, we have made it possible for users to have endless possibilities for their galleries.

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

nextgen-pro

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

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This Post Has 10 Comments

    1. Scott

      31 Jul 2013

      No ETA as of now because of how much is still in development for NextGEN Pro.

  2. Rich Guerriero

    7 Aug 2013

    I attempted to add 1 photo to a gallery last week and I was unable to do so. Could this have been caused to any recent updating? It was a small file and it was only one of many attempts of adding photos. The saving mode in green just stayed there for hours.???

    1. Scott

      8 Aug 2013

      Hi Rich, did you update WordPress to 3.6 without updating Photocrati to 4.6?

  3. Miguel

    8 Aug 2013

    Congratulations on all the hard work. When I started with Photocrati, some three years ago, I seem to recall that my only option at the time was NextGen. Photocrati introduced it’s own Gallery feature and, expecting to simplify my life, I made the switch. I understand that Photocrati 5.0 will fully integrate NextGen PRO in to it’s structure, so I’m not going to mess with any of my galleries for now.

    However, although I found a side by side comparison of the features in the Gallery vs. Pro versions, what I can’t find is a description of what each of the features mean in the real world. Is there a How To available anywhere that explains how the features work, how to implement them and examples of the features in action?

    Thanks for your time.

    1. Scott

      13 Aug 2013

      Hi Miguel,

      On the NextGEN Gallery site is a lot of documentation with screenshots and on the blog are video walkthroughs of the features. We are continuing to building those up. It is going to be some time before NextGEN Pro is integrated with the Photocrati theme, but it will have a lot more features than the current gallery system.

  4. Chip

    28 May 2014

    I have been holding off on re-doing my website, waiting for Photocrati 5.0 & Nextgen Gallery Pro. Is this coming anytime soon? I need what is in NextGen Pro but don’t want to pay for what will be built-in soon enough. My micro-budget just doesn’t justify upgrading to NG Pro.

    1. Scott

      29 May 2014

      We are working on an update before Photocrati 5 which won’t have NextGEN Pro in it, so if you really wanted that solution now you’d unfortunately have to purchase it separately. However, the update we’re working on now will be responsive which we know is a very popular request.

  5. John

    19 Oct 2014

    Hi @Scott,

    I have just installed Photocrati and now find that some of the features I really want are in NextGen Pro. I see above that NG Pro is available for $39. Is that offer still available? If not, maybe you should offer it as a bundle/discount/give way as goodwill for current Photocrati subscribers.

    Cheers

    John

    1. Scott

      20 Oct 2014

      NextGEN Pro was prices at $39 for a very long time, so people could hop on it at that low price. It won’t be going back down to that price again. However, we’re still working on the integration of NextGEN Pro with the Photocrati Theme. So at some point in the near future all (current subscribed at that point in time) Photocrati customers will have full access to NextGEN Pro instead of the built-in gallery system.

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