I have heard a lot of talk lately of people complaining that they are unable to have image gallery’s in WordPress 2.8= without adding a plugin. I assume this assumption comes from how hard it is to see what you can do when it comes to the gallery functions built into WordPress. If you look at my gallery page, you will see a simple native WordPress gallery. This gallery was built threw the theme but uses WordPress as it’s backend.
So How do I build a native WordPress gallery?
Well there’s two parts to accomplishing this successfully, but I’m only going to show you the first part in this post. First you need to create a Category for all your gallery posts to be filed under. This Category may be named anything you would like it to be named. I’m going to stick with the simple name of ‘Gallery’. You will need some posts to be filed under it. Create a new post as you normally would. It is best to put some text to tell you readers what this gallery is all about, but that’s not needed.
Once you are ready to create your gallery, switch the editer from ‘Visual’ mode to ‘HTML’ mode (on the top right). Once in ‘HTML’ mode, enter:
[ gallery ]
note: there should be no space between the brackets and the word ‘gallery’ (if I were to enter this line on my page, without the spaces, I would create a gallery).
Now switch back to the ‘Visual’ mode and you should see a new yellow box in your post box with an image of a camera with a photograph behind it. If you move your mouse over this new yellow box, two new icons will appear. From this point, just upload photos to your site and save it.
After you have uploaded your images, save the post and check it out on your website. Depending on your theme, you should see a nice full gallery on your page, or as I have, just a single thumbnail on your index page, but the full gallery on the posts page.
