The last two days have been a little weird for me since I’ve had this idea on how I want my image galleries to look like in the front page and I have yet to find the right solution.

I’ve had to resort to using what I’ve never really tried exploring just yet: Regular Expressions. Almost a year ago I tried to learn but got sidetracked with random other things like I usually do. This time I’m fully alert and ready to tackle this little task for a simple thing like finding numbers within a simple string.

The reason I’m having to resort to using regex is because for some reason I can’t seem to get a count for all the attachments from a single post that uses multiple galleries. It for some strange reason wants to only get the first galleries’ images and not the rest. It’s been driving me insane to an extent.

What I’m wanting to achieve sounds simple enough but for some reason it keeps giving me a headache that seems to not want to end.

The way the gallery will look sounds simple enough because all I want to display in the main/home/index page is one or two things. The first one being text that says how many galleries there are if there is more than one gallery being used in the post and how many images there are in the entire post. The second being a thumbnail of one image if there is only one gallery in the post.

The next stage is getting the styling for the gallery when it’s being viewed. Thankfully I am understanding what file is being queried thanks to the ‘debug’ plugin and the flowchart that I often try to use when I’m wanting to figure out what file to use. The file that will be next in my line up will be the attachment file. I’ve seen some good examples; they all seem to follow a common pattern which is good because I’ll be able to use a simple design.

In the meantime I still need to figure out how I’m going to count all the images in a single post that uses more than one gallery.

Looks like I’ll be reading and spending more time in front of a screen to solve my little dilemma.