WordPress Version: 3.3.1
NextGEN Gallery Version: 1.9.3 (the problem exists in all versions)
Plugin Author: http://alexrabe.de/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/

Update: April 2012. See the NextGen Caption Fix post for details of my fix for this problem.

Problem:

NextGEN Gallery template=caption Bug

I’ve just ugraded to the latest version of the NextGen Gallery Plugin and as in previous versions it has in my opinion a problem with it’s handling of Titles/Captions/Alt-Text and Descriptions.

Logically Titles, Captions and Alt-Text would usually be set to just a few words where-as a Description would be longer. This logic is correctly reflected in the NextGen plugin Gallery Settings page where the Alt & title Text input field is a single line (no html allowed) and the Description input field can be any size you want (with html allowed). In my woodlbock print gallery I set the Alt & Title field to be the artist and print name. The Description field is set to be a html table containing details about the artist and print. My gallery pages all use the shortcode [nggallery id=x template=caption].

NextGen Gallery Settings

NextGen Gallery Settings

Up to this point NextGen Gallery and I agree on how to handle these fields. Now however, we go our separate ways as when viewing any gallery on my website the following issues appear.

(1) The large Description field (a html table in my case) is being used as the thumbnails caption totally destroying the layout. What should appear in the image below is a nice thumbnail grid view with each thumbnail having a Title/Caption of a few words under it. As can be seen that’s not what’s being displayed.

NextGen Template Caption Shortcode - Web Page Layout

NextGen Template Caption Shortcode - Web Page Layout

(2) Hovering my mouse beside a thumbmail displays the raw html table stored in the Description field.

NextGen Template Caption Shortcode - Mouse Hover Effect

NextGen Template Caption Shortcode - Mouse Hover Effect

(3) A view page source of the gallery page shows it is cluttered up with ‘junk’ as a result of the Description field being used as the href title tag. This also occurs on any web page where the NextGen Widget is used to show Random/Recent updates.

NextGen Gallery - Page Source Problem

NextGen Gallery - Page Source Problem

The examples above are from my test site running the latest version of the NextGen Gallery plugin. To see the gallery working correctly after I’d made some coding changes in the NextGen plugin visit http://japaneseartsgallery.com or more specifically the Osamu Sugiyama Woodblock Prints page.