Gallery is a Thematic child theme, designed by Chris Wallace. Yes, that’s right – a child theme. Okay, gallery-style WordPress themes aren’t exactly a new concept, but when I first saw this theme, I was simply amazed.

In this review post, I’ll go step-by-step with my experience with using this theme, including how to install it, set it up, and add content.

Gallery Screenshot

And now onto the review…

Setting Up

Remember, this is a child theme, so you’ll need to upload both the parent theme as well as the child theme. Here are some basic instructions:

  • Download Thematic, extract the folder, and upload it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory.
  • Download Gallery, extract the folder, and upload it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory.
  • Login to your WordPress admin panel, go to Appearance → Themes, and activate the “Gallery” theme

Gallery Activated

There are some more detailed instructions on installing WordPress child themes over at Themelets.

After everything is uploaded and installed correctly, you should have a WordPress site that looks something like this.

Gallery Installed

Now that everything is set up and functional, we can start adding content!

Thumbnail Sizing

Since this theme depends heavily on thumbnail images that are 125×125, we might as well go into our WordPress options and make sure the thumbnail size is set to that amount.

Gallery Media Settings

For a little more control, you might want to look into using the Max Image Size Control plugin. This way you don’t have constantly resize images. Let WordPress do the hard work for you.

Assuming you’re using screenshots of webpages for your gallery items, I would highly recommend the ScreenGrab add-on for Firefox, which makes it very simple to save full-page screenshots.

Adding Content

Hopefully now that you have your thumbnail situation squared away (no pun intended), you can start to add content. By popular demand, a post settings panel was added in version 1.1 of the Gallery theme. This way you don’t have to mess around with custom fields.

Gallery Post Settings

This is pretty self-explanatory, just make sure you input the full path to the images. If you’re not sure of the image URLs, try to insert them in the post and copy the URL from there. If you want the Delicious and Twitter links to show up, fill out the Website URL box.

After everything is filled out, you should get something like this.

Gallery Single

Optional Plugins

As you can see in the above screenshot, you may see the 5 stars to the right of the title on single post pages. These are from Lester Chan’s WP-PostRatings plugin. Here’s how to set them up.

  • Go to Plugins → Add New, search for “PostRatings” (should be the first result), install, and activate it.
  • To get transparent PNG working, go into your plugin editor and carefully edit the top lines so PNG (instead of GIF) are active.
  • Under “Ratings AJAX Style” change both ‘Show Loading Image With Text’ and ‘Show Fading In And Fading Out Of Ratings’ to ‘No’
  • Under “Ratings Templates” change ‘Ratings Vote Text’ to %RATINGS_IMAGES_VOTE% and ‘Ratings Voted Text’ to %RATINGS_IMAGES%.

The theme also has styles already defined for the Contact Form 7 plugin, and well as the BuySellAds plugin.

Conclusion

I also think it’s worth mentioning the Galleria child theme, which is a child theme of Hybrid. It has a few minor differences from the original Gallery child theme. Depending on your personal preference, you may want to give this a shot as well.

All in all, this is a very cool theme. Not to mention it’s a Thematic child theme, which makes it even cooler, and you know it’s built on a rock-solid framework. With the thumbnails all configured to resize to the perfect dimensions, it would probably be relatively easy to maintain an active gallery site.

I plan on using a customized version this theme for a new gallery-style site. More on that soon. So, what did you think of the theme? Will you be using it? Let me know in the comments.