Bowst Team
There are tons of modules available for building slideshows and galleries in Drupal. In general, the Drupal module will simply create a Drupal admin UI for implementing the features of a popular jQuery plugin. Drupal’s Galleria is one of these such modules. It adds (or so it claims) an image formatter for Galleria. But from my experinece with it so far, it simply does not work.
The documentation says:
Go to the “Manage Display” page of your content type. Set the “Format” of your image field to “Galleria”.
But there is no format in the list for “Galleria”. There is a thread open about this issue, but no useful solution is offered. (Clearing my cache did not fix the issue.)
After spending some time reading the documentation for both the Drupal module and the jQuery plugin, I decided that the plugin would be easier to implement myself, without the fancy Drupal bridge. So I uninstalled the Drupal module and went into my custom javascript… Still no luck. No Galleria on my images. This time, it was due to javascript errors. Galleria uses the jQuery on() method, which was not introduced until jQuery 1.7. Drupal comes with jQuery 1.4.4 (which was released in 2010, practically the Stone Ages in internet years.)
So, I’m almost ready to flip my desk at this point, but I remember there is a module for updating jQuery in Drupal to a newer version. But this is also not an option, because it breaks the Views UI if you updated to a recent enough version to make the Galleria plugin work. This bug report “JQuery Update breaks Views UI” is a top hit in Google when searching for the module.
I have now uninstalled both the Drupal module and the jQuery plugin for Galleria and gone back to the plugin I should have used all along: jQuery Cycle. I love jQuery Cycle. It might take a little longer to set up with the exact features and styles I want, but in the end, it is always worth it. And I do not use a Drupal module for it.
Side note: I am not trying to say that Galleria isn’t a great jQuery plugin. Just that you shouldn’t try to use it with Drupal 7. I can’t wait for Drupal 8!
