Understanding the NextGEN Gallery Text Domain Mismatch

If you're a developer or a multilingual WordPress user, you may have encountered a technical inconsistency with the 'Photo Gallery, Sliders, Proofing and Themes – NextGEN Gallery' plugin related to its text domain. This article explains what this issue is and what the official stance is on it.

What is the Text Domain Mismatch?

The plugin's official slug (its unique identifier in the WordPress Plugin Directory) is nextgen-gallery. However, within the plugin's source code, the text domain—a crucial component for translating the plugin into different languages—is set to nggallery. According to WordPress coding standards, these two names should be identical for optimal compatibility and to facilitate the migration of translations to the official WordPress translation platform.

Why Does This Happen?

This discrepancy is a legacy coding convention that the plugin's development team has acknowledged. The text domain nggallery was established in earlier versions of the plugin and has persisted through updates. While the plugin requires WordPress 4.6 or higher (a version that allows the text domain header to be omitted if the slug and text domain match), the existing translations and internal function calls still use the old domain.

Official Response and Outlook

The 'Photo Gallery, Sliders, Proofing and Themes – NextGEN Gallery' team, operated by Imagely, has publicly acknowledged this issue in support forums. They have stated that aligning the text domain with the plugin slug is on their development agenda. This change is a necessary step for them to fully migrate the plugin's translations to the WordPress.org translation system, which would make it easier for the community to contribute translations.

For now, this mismatch does not typically cause functional problems for the average user. It is primarily a behind-the-scenes standardization issue that the development team is aware of and plans to address in a future update.