Gallery2 (g2) Widget Support

After changing my hosting provider a few months back I finally got around to putting my image gallery back online.   I installed F-Spot on Gnome and organised a bunch of my photos (not all of them yet) into Tags.  I then put a fresh install of Gallery2 up and uploaded them all though F-Spot.  Simple enough.

Next however, I wanted to display a random image in the sidebar of this blog which is hosted on the same server but on a different domain.  I picked up the line of php from the Image Block section of gallery and tried to put this in one of the text widgets.

Text Widgets don’t support PHP however.

I looked all over the Web and couldn’t find a solution; I tried a few different widgets but none of which seemed to work.  I even tried a widget which lets you run PHP Execs but it gave a security error generated by Gallery2.

In the end I came up with a solution.

I inserted the PHP External Image Block code generated by Gallery2 and put this line into a .php file (I called it photos.php and located it in the wp-content directory).  Then I created a new text widget and setup an iFrame with the following aspects:

src=”/wp-content/photo.php” FRAMEBORDER=”0″ MARGINWIDTH=”0″ MARGINHEIGHT=”0″

The result is the Random image that you should be able to see to the left.  It’s hardly ideal but seems to work.