I’m glad to hear you’re finding MLA useful; thanks. This is a great question, and I can give you some ideas on how to do it with [mla_gallery].
First, you want a gallery that “pulls PDFs from multiple parent pages”. The Xerces Society site you give as an example doesn’t exactly do that. The list has a thumbnail image, a description and a link to the parent page. The parent page has a “Download a copy for free (pdf)” link to the PDF. To do something similar:
- Create the parent page(s)
- Upload the thumbnail image and pdf; attach them to the parent page
- Create a custom field, e.g., “Page Summary” for each thumbnail image. Enter the description you want to show in the gallery
- Assign tag, category, attachment_tag or attachment_category terms (e.g., “Parks and Golf Courses”) to the thumbnail images, etc.
Now you can create an [mla_gallery attachment_tag="Parks and Golf Courses" post_parent=any] shortcode to pull the thumbnail images you want. The post_parent=any parameter will filter out any images that aren’t attached to some page or post.
To get a gallery listing that looks like the Xerces Society example, start from the “Table-based Template Example” in the Settings/Media Library Assistant page Documentation tab.
In the “Item” markup, you’ll want to replace the [+link+] substitution parameter with something like <a href='https://yoursite.com/?page_id=[+parent+]' title='[+title+]'>[+thumbnail_content+]</a>. Change yoursite.com to your own URL, of course. The ?page_id=[+parent+] argument links to the parent page.
You’ll also want to replace the second table cell with something like [+custom:Page Summary+] to get the description you created in the custom field for each thumbnail image.
Finally, add the mla_style=table and mla_markup=table parameters to your [mla_gallery] shortcode to apply the custom template to your gallery.
You may need to adjust the above approach based on your application, but I hope that gets you started. If you have any problems or questions, let me know. When you’ve got it up and running, post a link to the site so we can see the results.
Thanks again for a stimulating question, and for using the plugin.
