This is a day long in the making, as we’ve been hard at work on this the last few months, but we can finally announce that MaxGalleria 2.0 is ready for mass consumption. As we wrote a few weeks ago, MaxGalleria has changed from a single plugin into a full-blown gallery platform for WordPress.

Why It Matters

The new MaxGalleria is significant because it changes the game for how people think about WordPress galleries. Sure, there are plenty of gallery plugins out there, each doing their own specific thing, but there’s nothing that ties them all together. Galleries are an important part of the WordPress ecosystem and we felt we could deliver a solid foundation for managing WordPress galleries, then build upon this foundation to give users the best possible WordPress gallery experience.

It also matters because people deserve a better solution than NextGEN, which became the de facto standard not because it was any good, but simply because it was free and early to market. However, that tide is changing because people are expecting and demanding a better experience, and they are actively looking for NextGEN alternatives.

What It Means

A lot, actually:

For our customers, it means more choice without having the kitchen sink thrown at them. We found that most people only used pieces and parts of the original MaxGalleria plugin, but not everything. It made sense for us to break things apart and let customers pick and choose the parts they need. Plus, all existing customers get grandfathered in for some of the paid addons.

For developers, it means having a gallery platform that makes it easy to customize and extend just about anyway they, or their clients, want. MaxGalleria and its addons are loaded with actions and filters, each documented for full reference, and we’ll continue to add more hooks as the platform evolves.

For the WordPress community, it means having a go-to alternative to NextGEN. The core MaxGalleria plugin is free and has plenty of features to help convert NextGEN users, including an import tool that makes it super simple to bring NextGEN galleries into MaxGalleria. WordPress users deserve a better gallery plugin, and this is it.

What’s Next

This is literally just the beginning. With the core MaGalleria in place, and several addons already available, we will continue to push the platform forward to deliver value for WordPress gallery users.