FotoGrids 1.1.1 is out, the first update since 1.1.0. Three things are worth knowing about it.
Gallery and album pages can live at any address you choose. Adding items from a folder or a ZIP does what it always said it did. And a caching bug that quietly broke gallery layouts for logged-out visitors — while looking perfectly fine to you — is fixed.
Your galleries, at your address
Every gallery and album has had its own public page since 1.0.0. Until now that page lived at a fixed address: /fotogrids/gallery/your-slug. If you wanted /portfolio/, or /work/, or nothing in front of the slug at all, the only route was writing a filter.
Settings → View Pages now has fields for it. There is a prefix, and a segment for each collection type, with a live preview of the address underneath. Any of the three can be left empty — clear the prefix and the word “gallery” and your galleries answer at example.com/your-slug.
The part that took the work is what happens when you save. The base is checked against your existing pages and posts, the rewrite slugs of every other post type and taxonomy on the site, and the paths WordPress keeps for itself. If something already owns the address you asked for, the save is rejected and the conflicting owner is named — nothing is stored, so a save can never leave you with gallery pages that resolve to nothing.
Setting both collection types to the same base works too, which is what makes example.com/your-slug possible for galleries and albums at once. WordPress would normally let one type’s rewrite rule swallow the other’s; a shared route resolves the slug across both instead, and a page or post sitting under the same base still opens as it did before.
Addresses you were using before keep working. Anything built on the old base, and anything ending in a collection ID rather than a slug, redirects to the current permalink.
One thing to know: without a permalink structure set in Settings → Permalinks, WordPress serves view pages from a query string and never reads a rewrite base at all. The panel says so, and previews the address your site is actually serving.
Add a whole folder, or a ZIP
The Add New menu has carried From Folder and From ZIP for a while. They now work.
On the server browses your uploads directory: breadcrumbs, sub-folders with their image counts, a thumbnail grid, and per-file selection. Images already in your Media Library are reused rather than duplicated, and the rest are registered where they already sit — nothing on disk is copied, moved or deleted. Generated sizes are resolved and hidden, so a month folder lists your photos instead of four entries for each one.
From my computer is a folder picker. Choose a directory and every image in it uploads.
From ZIP pulls the images out of an archive.
The SEO tab now tells you something
The item editor’s SEO tab used to hold four Pro cards and an upgrade button. It was the only tab in that modal carrying no information about the item — while alt text, filename, title, caption and credit, which are the fields search engines actually read, were all sitting one tab away in Free.
It now runs seven checks against the item and grades it Bad, Needs improvement or Good. Each check states its verdict in a sentence, and anything that needs work carries a Fix link that switches to the tab holding that field and puts the cursor in it. Missing alt text caps the grade at Bad on its own, however much else is filled in. The Pro badge is gone.
Galleries that looked broken to everyone but you
This one is worth explaining, because if you hit it you probably thought something was wrong with your theme.
Rendered galleries are cached. The cache stored the HTML, but not the inline custom properties the render had produced alongside it — the values that tell the grid how many columns to draw. On a cache hit the gallery reached the page without them, the column rule became invalid, and everything collapsed into a single column.
You would never have seen it. The cache is bypassed for anyone who can manage galleries, so the version you were looking at was always correct. Logged-out visitors got the broken one.
Cache entries written before this release are treated as misses and re-render, so the fix applies to galleries already cached rather than waiting for them to expire.
Random sorting had a related problem. The order was chosen once while the page was built, and every cache in front of it — ours, your page builder’s, your host’s, your CDN’s — stored that one order. Random galleries were the same on every visit. They vary again.
Smaller ones
Every chart in wp-admin was blank — Library, Statistics, the dashboard widgets — because the bundled Chart.js build threw an error on load. Rebuilt, and updated to 4.5.1.
Statistics now follows the period filter. Views and Interactions report the 7, 30 or 90 days you selected rather than all time, each with a change against the preceding window of the same length, and the lifetime figure moves to a footnote. The top content tables sort.
The Featured Item layout’s Show all images button rendered correctly and did nothing when clicked. It works.
Choosing a template in the setup wizard used to send you to the Templates page, whose only action is Apply — which needs a gallery you do not have yet on your first day. It now creates the gallery from the template you picked.
The bundled offline template set carried 46 Pro entries with no settings behind them. If the template catalogue was unreachable they rendered as grey cards that could apply nothing. They are gone; the offline set is 23 gallery and 5 album templates, all of which work.
The full list of changes is on the changelog, and what is coming next is on the roadmap.