Add Contributor Galleries to your Author Pages

Required version: 0.3.01+

PhotoSmash lets you add a gallery of contributors’ submitted images to their Author page on your blog. The URL would be something like: http://smashly.net/blog/author/byron/, perhaps minus the blog part in your site.

Enable the galleries on Author pages:

1. In PhotoSmash Settings, go to Special Galleries
2. Check “Show Contributor Galleries”
3. [Optional] – if you want to suppress all the other posts by that author and just show the gallery of their images, Check the “Suppress Contributor posts”.  Why would I ever want to do that???  Well, I have a client who creates a new post for each uploaded image that is submitted.  He also displays the images in a gallery on the front page of the site.  Check it out at SavorySights.  It’s all enabled by PhotoSmash   He wanted the gallery view on the author pages instead of the single posts view.

A screenshot hopefully shows how easy it is!

Adding a link to a Contributor’s Author Page

If you’re using the standard gallery layout (not a Custom Layout), there are 2 options in the caption styles that will let you add a link to each image’s contributor’s gallery:

Note: Look at the very bottom of that list (right above this), see that “Mass update galleries”? That allows you to set the Caption style for all of your existing galleries to whatever you have selected.  If you don’t do that, you’ll need to go into each one of your galleries that you want the caption style to apply to and update them individually in Gallery Settings page.

Important! “Mass update galleries” does not save this setting to your PhotoSmash Settings defaults.  It only updates existing galleries.  So be sure to save the options here as well.  The PhotoSmash Settings defaults generally apply to either Global settings or are only defaults for new galleries.  Any time you see the icon, that is a gallery-specific setting, giving you ultimate flexibility in your site design, muhahahaha!!!!

Trick out your Contributor Gallery!

Oh yes, you can go hog wild tricking out your contributor gallery, even using a custom layout.  They operate just like a regular gallery, except they do not allow you to show an Upload Form.

There are 2 ways a contributor gallery definition can be created:

1. You’ve activated Contributor Galleries, and somebody visits the Author page.  This will automatically generate a new gallery the first time the Author page is visited.  This gallery will be call…drum roll…”Contributor Gallery”, and can be tricked out in Gallery Settings. Note…I just tried this on Smashly, and the first time visiting the author page showed the gallery, but no images…a bug, I think.
2. You can manually create one in Gallery Settings by setting the “Gallery type” setting to Contributor Gallery:
   

   Note: while you can create mulitple galleries that have a Gallery type of “Contributor gallery”, only the first one that has Activated (around the 3rd setting from the top in Gallery Settings) checked will be used.

Once you’ve got your gallery created, you can control it’s look and feel using nearly all of the settings in Gallery Settings, including setting it to use any Custom Layout that you’ve created!

That’s about it!