Engaging your audience can be a challenge, but a dynamic gallery could just be the solution you’re looking for! Having any dynamic element on your site is a good way to boost audience engagement while keeping your content fresh and relevant. Plus it can be easy to implement and even save you time.

But what is dynamic content and how can it help? In this post, we’re going to take a look at what we mean by a dynamic gallery and some of the benefits of using a dynamic element on your site. We’ll also chat about how to set up your own dynamic gallery.

What Is Dynamic Content?

Dynamic content is an element or content on your page that continually changes. For example, it may change depending on the location of the user, such as weather updates or news feeds relevant to your location. Another good example is when an online store updates products depending on what is in stock or what is on sale.

Dynamic content on website

This makes for a far more engaging, interactive website, especially when compared to static content that never changes. This is because the dynamic elements on your site frequently update or change, as they pull in the relevant content from a datasource. So visitors get more relevant, up-to-date content.

But what is a datasource? It is, quite simply, a source from which the data originates. Depending on the dynamic element on your site, you could pull in content from various datasources. One example of this could be a Twitter widget, which constantly updates with tweets from your feed; the datasource in this scenario would be Twitter.

As you can probably already guess, there are many different types of dynamic content, and there are a variety of different dynamic elements that you can add to your website to keep it ‘fresh’. In this post, though, we’re just going to focus on dynamic galleries. A dynamic gallery is a photo gallery on your site, where the images update to show new content based on changes made to the datasource.

Here’s an example of a dynamic gallery using a post query as the datasource. The gallery pulls in our latest blog posts, and when a new post is added, the gallery updates to reflect this:

Benefits Of Using Dynamic Gallery

There are many advantages to using dynamic content in general. As we mentioned earlier, it makes for a more engaging website as the content or elements on the site are frequently changing. This also means that content is always fresh. And as we know, new content is a great way to get visitors coming back, so a dynamic element can also help keep audience numbers up.

Another benefit is that you only have to update content once. In other words, if you’re using a server folder for your datasource, you would only update the content on the server folder. The gallery would then automatically update. So you wouldn’t need to make changes to individual galleries, media items or other elements – you’d only need to make changes once to the server folder.

The obvious advantage here, is that it saves you time. Rather than adding images one-by-one to your media library, you can instead update your datasource with new content, which then updates your gallery. One example of how this would help, is with a WooCommerce product gallery. Instead of adding each product to WooCommerce, and then again to your product gallery, you could save yourself loads of time by rather adding products to WooCommerce and then using this as a datasource for your gallery. Your product information is therefore easy to keep up-to-date, and your gallery reflects the latest changes you have made to your WooCommerce products.

A gallery is a great dynamic element to add to your site, and it’s easy to do so. To add a dynamic gallery to your WordPress site, you will first need the tools to do this. In the case of a dynamic gallery, FooGallery PRO Expert is a good solution as it integrates with several datasources from which you can generate galleries. These include media tags and categories, server folders and post queries. You can even make use of separate plugins to pull in galleries from Adobe lightroom and your media library. Plus, if you’re using FooGallery PRO Commerce, you can generate product galleries from your WooCommerce products.

Aside from the variety of datasources available to you, FooGallery PRO makes it simple to create dynamic galleries. Let’s take a quick look at basic steps for doing this:

Step 1: Implement Your Datasource

The first thing you will need to do is have your datasource set up. The process will depend on the source from which you want your gallery to pull your images. If we look at the example of Media Tags, you would simply need to have added tags to your images. With FooGallery PRO, you can do this when you upload an image, from within the media library, or from within a gallery. If you’re wanting to use WooCommerce as a datasource, however, you would need to install WooCommerce and create your products.

Step 2: Add A Gallery

Once you have your datasource set up, you can create a new dynamic gallery with FooGallery PRO (Expert or Commerce). To do this, click on Add Gallery. Here you will see an option to add media from another source; click on this. Now you can choose which datasource you will use to create your gallery.

select datasource for dynamic gallery

Once you have selected your datasource, you will be able to tailor the options to suit your gallery. For example, if you select Post Query, you can choose the post type that you want to use in the gallery, from all the available options on your site. If you select Media Tags, you will be shown all of the available tags on your existing images, and you’ll be able to select which of these tags are displayed in the gallery.

Depending on your datasource selection, you may have additional options as well, such as how many images to display, the sort order, and so on. A dynamic WooCommerce gallery, for example, includes a range of options such as the sort order, including the price as the description, and so on – take a look at the screenshot below. (Note that the WooCommerce datasource is only available in FooGallery PRO Commerce).

woocommerce gallery options

When you have finalised your selection (don’t worry – you can always make changes to this later) you can style and publish your gallery.

Step 3: Updating Your Gallery

The final step in the process is keeping your dynamic gallery updated. But this doesn’t mean that you need to update your gallery! Rather, you now just need to keep your datasource updated. For example, if you’re using media tags for your gallery, and you want to add new content, you would simply add new images with relevant media tags to your library.

Similarly, for a dynamic product gallery, you would just need to update your WooCommerce products for the changes to reflect in the gallery itself. If you sell out of a product, or get new stock, you would make the changes to the WooCommerce products. The gallery would then pick up these changes and adjust accordingly.

As you can see, adding a dynamic element to your site does have its advantages. It keeps your content fresh and engaging, and in the case of a dynamic gallery, it only requires you to update content in one place.

So if you are using a photo gallery, and want to implement a dynamic element, then this is a good option for you. You can choose from one of several datasources, allowing you to sort and categorise your media, and then easily display it. FooGallery PRO Expert or FooGallery PRO Commerce make this an easy solution for adding dynamic content to your site, while saving you time and energy.