NextGEN Download Gallery v1.5.0 has just been released. It fixes a problem selecting the download template in NextGEN Gallery, and adds new action hooks for developers.

NextGEN Download Gallery uses a custom gallery template to provide a simple download form for images. Using it has been as simple as activating the plugin and typing in the template name, “download”, when adding a gallery to a page or post. Recent versions of NextGEN Gallery removed the ability to do that in the gallery picker, however. I submitted a patch which was recently accepted, and this release of NextGEN Download Gallery works with that patch. So, when Photocrati next release NextGEN Gallery, you’ll be able to pick the download gallery template from the list of available templates.

This release also adds two new action hooks, ngg_dlgallery_zip_before_send and ngg_dlgallery_zip_after_send. They allow theme and plugin writers to get alerts when a collection of images is downloaded. This would be useful for download statistics gathering, for example.

The way that Download All functions has changed in this release, although hopefully nobody will notice! It used to make a request with the gallery or taglist ID in the request URL; it now posts the request in the same way as the regular download function. This fixes a few edge case problems with large taglist galleries and tetchy servers.

If you’ve customised the download gallery template, don’t worry — the old approach to Download All will still work. You might want to incorporate the changes into your template, but you won’t need to if everything is working OK for you now.

There are some new localised strings in this release, so please help me translate NextGEN Download Gallery if you are able to.