Sometime last week I had an idea that finally managed to come alive. More and more I have been getting more and more ideas when it comes to creating WordPress themes. The most recent one being a theme that – much like twenty-thirteen does – showcases post formats. I still have to work with audio, video as well as a few other formats but the one that really had me in a bit of a pickle was the image gallery.

When WordPress 3.5 was released it introduced a better method of media insertion. Extremely user-friendly. I fell in love with it when I saw the mock-ups in the make.wordpress.org blog. One thing that really intrigued me was the use of multiple galleries in a single post. I thought: this should make for great use of the Content Management System side of WordPress.

The Idea

My next thought was how to harness that and be able to display it for those that would like to know. Being a photographer by hobby I wondered how to get that information. The first thing was to count instances of a single gallery. The next would count the images in all the galleries. Simple. By first getting the gallery instance count I could now set a simple if/else statement for my output.

The code

Looking at some example galleries gave me some clue as to what to look for. The next step was to gather the needed information. Thankfully WordPress has some really simple, and neat, functions to help and make things a little easier. The one function that actually does most of the work is get_posts() by getting all the attachments in a given post. From there you can find how many instances a post has a simple regular expression matching magic.

So the first thing is to count how many images there are in the post. Now, we can use get_children but the thing I found interesting about that function is that it calls get_posts. I figured cut the middleman and just use get_posts instead. So my gallery page looks a little like:

// Get all the attachments
$attachments = get_posts ( array(
 'numberposts' => -1,
 'post_type' => 'attachment',
 'post_mime_type' => 'image',
 'post_parent' => get_the_ID(),
 'post_status' => 'inherit',
 ) );

// Count all the attachments
$total = count( $attachments );

Now, I know it may seem a little strange for some as to why I’m getting the post_type of ‘attachment’ but that is how WordPress handles media and posts in general from what I’ve learned. Next thing is to get the gallery shortcode.

Shortcode?

Yes, I said shortcode. WordPress uses shortcodes on a given post to display certain things and a media gallery is a good example of this. The plus side is that there is a function that grabs that for us. At least the regular expression for the shortcode. Next, we store it for later use and grab the content as well:

// Get the content in order to find the gallery shortcode
$string = get_the_content();

// Get the gallery shortcode regex
$pattern = get_shortcode_regex();

With that we can now use PHP regular expression matching and match all the instances of [gallery] in a single post and store it for later use. With two PHP functions we now have the end result:

// Get all the attachments
$attachments = get_posts ( array(
    'numberposts'    => -1,
    'post_type'      => 'attachment',
    'post_mime_type' => 'image',
    'post_parent'    => get_the_ID(),
    'post_status'    => 'inherit',
    ) );

// Count all the attachments
$total = count( $attachments );

// Grab the permalink
$link = get_permalink();

// Get the content in order to find the gallery shortcode
$string = get_the_content();

// Get the gallery shortcode regex
$pattern = get_shortcode_regex();
preg_match_all( "/$pattern/s", $string, $matches );

// Count how many matches and store it for later use
$galleries = count( $matches[0] );

// IF there is only one gallery show just the image count else show both the gallery and image count
if ( $galleries > 1 ):
    $output = 'With <span class="gallery-count">%2$s</span> galleries with <span class="image-count">%1$s</span> images unique images.';
else:
    $output = 'With <span class="image-count">%1$s</span> unique images.';
endif;

printf ( $output, $total, $galleries );

The result

The end result that I wanted was a simple line of text that provides simple information for a visitor. The one thing to note though is that if galleries share a photo it will not be counted twice.


Comments

3 responses to “Displaying the gallery count and the images”

  1. Or just use get_post_galleries ?

    1. Very true, but do keep in mind that the function wasn’t introduced until 3.6 which was a few months after I wrote this. 🙂