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A minimal monochrome photography gallery plugin for WordPress, built for Cloudways hosting. Designed for abstract and fine-art photography — clean grid/masonry layouts, full EXIF display, a world map view, smart albums, and multi-layer image protection.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0+
• PHP 8.1+ with GD extension (standard on Cloudways)
• MySQL 5.7+ / MariaDB 10.3+
• EXIF support in PHP (exif_read_data — enabled by default on Cloudways)

Installation

1. Upload the mono-gallery folder to wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate via Plugins → Installed Plugins.
3. On activation the plugin:
   • Creates five database tables (wp_mono_photos, wp_mono_albums, wp_mono_photo_albums, wp_mono_tags, wp_mono_photo_tags)
   • Creates the upload directory structure under wp-content/uploads/mono-gallery/
   • Writes .htaccess rules blocking direct access to image files
   • Generates a Cloudways Nginx config snippet at mono-gallery/cloudways-nginx.conf
4. Follow the Cloudways setup steps under Mono Gallery → Settings → Setup & Help.

Shortcodes

Features

Gallery display

• CSS grid and CSS masonry layouts (no JavaScript layout library)
• Lightbox with swipe support and keyboard navigation (← → Esc)
• EXIF panel in lightbox: camera, lens, aperture, shutter, ISO, focal length, date
• Leaflet.js world map (OpenStreetMap tiles, no API key required) — grayscale filtered to match the monochrome aesthetic
• Lazy loading on all images
• Search and album/tag filters on the front end

Photo management

• Drag-and-drop bulk uploader in the admin (JPEG, PNG, WebP)
• EXIF extraction on upload: camera make/model, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, GPS coordinates, date taken
• Tags (free-form, comma-separated)
• Manual albums — assign photos individually
• Smart albums — auto-populated by rules (camera model, lens, ISO, aperture, date year/month, GPS presence, tag, import source). All rules are AND-combined.

Import

• Google Photos — full OAuth2 integration. Imports media items from any album or your entire library. Skips duplicates and videos automatically.
• Apple Photos — iCloud Shared Album import. Create a shared album in Photos.app, copy the iCloud link, paste it into the import page. No Apple developer account required.

Image protection

Watermark

• Server-side GD watermarking — burned into served copies, originals untouched
• Configurable text (supports {year} placeholder), position (9 positions), opacity, and size
• Drop a mono.ttf TrueType font into assets/fonts/ for crisp text rendering; falls back to GD's built-in bitmap font
• Watermark cache invalidated automatically when settings change

Performance (Cloudways-optimised)

• Redis object cache — photo queries, EXIF lookups, and thumbnail existence checks are cached via wp_cache_*. When the Redis Object Cache plugin is active on Cloudways, all cache calls hit Redis automatically.
• WebP conversion — opt-in. JPEG/PNG thumbnails are converted to WebP on first request and cached. Browsers that send Accept: image/webp receive WebP automatically (~30% smaller).
• 304 Not Modified — ETag headers on all image responses. Browsers skip re-downloading images they've seen before.
• On-demand thumbnails — thumbnails are generated on first request, not on upload. Large imports don't block.
• X-Accel-Buffering: no — tells Nginx not to buffer the full image in memory before sending.
• X-Cache-Bypass: 1 — tells Cloudways Breeze to skip its cache for image proxy requests.

Cloudways Setup

1. Enable Redis

1. Cloudways Platform → Application → Packages → ensure Redis is installed.
2. In WordPress, install the Redis Object Cache plugin.
3. Settings → Redis → Enable Object Cache.

2. Apply Nginx Rules

1. Cloudways Platform → Application → Settings & Packages → Nginx Settings → Custom Vhost.
2. Copy the contents of mono-gallery/cloudways-nginx.conf and paste them in.
3. Save and restart Nginx.

The snippet:

• Blocks direct access to gallery image directories at the Nginx layer
• Bypasses Varnish/Breeze for the image proxy and REST API endpoints
• Sets generous FastCGI timeouts for large image handling

3. Breeze Cache Exclusions

Settings → Breeze → CDN / Advanced — add these to the exclusion list:

/mono-gallery/img/
/wp-json/mono-gallery/

4. Cloudflare (if used)

Add a Cache Rule in Cloudflare to bypass cache for */mono-gallery/img/*. Signed image URLs are per-user and must never be served from a shared CDN cache.

5. PHP Settings

In Cloudways → Application → Settings & Packages → PHP FPM Settings:

REST API

All endpoints are under /wp-json/mono-gallery/v1/.

File Structure

mono-gallery/
├── mono-gallery.php              Main plugin file
├── cloudways-nginx.conf          Generated Nginx config snippet (copy to Cloudways)
├── assets/
│   └── fonts/
│       └── mono.ttf              (drop your .ttf here for watermark text)
├── includes/
│   ├── class-activator.php       DB setup, upload dirs, .htaccess, Nginx config
│   ├── class-photo.php           Photo CRUD and tag management
│   ├── class-album.php           Album CRUD and photo membership
│   ├── class-exif.php            EXIF extraction (GD/exif_read_data)
│   ├── class-image-server.php    Protected image proxy, watermarking, WebP serving
│   ├── class-cache.php           Redis/object cache helpers
│   ├── class-webp.php            WebP conversion and stats
│   ├── class-google-photos.php   Google Photos OAuth2 and import
│   ├── class-apple-photos.php    iCloud Shared Albums import
│   ├── class-smart-albums.php    Smart album rule engine
│   └── class-rest-api.php        REST API endpoints
├── admin/
│   ├── class-admin.php           Admin menus and settings pages
│   ├── css/admin.css
│   └── js/admin.js               Library grid, uploader, album builder
└── public/
    ├── class-shortcode.php       Shortcode registration
    ├── css/gallery.css           Minimal monochrome front-end CSS
    └── js/gallery.js             Grid, masonry, lightbox, map, protection

Changelog

1.0.1 — Security patch

• [Critical] Fixed SSRF in Apple Photos import: strict regex allowlist now enforces that the iCloud API host matches p{N}-sharedstreams.icloud.com exactly — subdomain confusion attacks (e.g. icloud.com.evil.com) are rejected
• [Critical] Fixed SSRF via unvalidated download URLs in Apple Photos import: download URLs must be https:// and resolve to *.icloud.com or *.apple.com before download_url() is called
• [High] Fixed broken Google Photos OAuth state verification: wp_verify_nonce() arguments were swapped, meaning the incoming state was never actually compared — corrected argument order
• [High] Added require_admin permission check to the Google OAuth callback REST endpoint, which was previously publicly accessible
• [High] Upload MIME type validation now uses wp_check_filetype_and_ext() (validates file bytes, not just extension) plus getimagesize() confirmation — prevents extension-spoofed uploads
• [High] Tab labels in admin settings page escaped with esc_html() (XSS hardening)
• [Medium] Image proxy tokens are now time-windowed (24-hour expiry, previous window also accepted) — leaked URLs from logs/referrers eventually expire
• [Medium] Watermark cache file written atomically via temp-file-then-rename, eliminating TOCTOU race condition under concurrent requests
• [Medium] Watermark cache key now derived from watermark-specific settings only, not the full options array (which included Google OAuth secrets)
• [Medium] Google Photos OAuth tokens stored in a non-autoloaded wp_options row, reducing exposure in serialized dumps and per-request memory
• [Medium] sort_order album field validated against an explicit allowlist before storage
• [Low] Plugin directory protected by .htaccess blocking web access to .conf, .md, .txt files (prevents the generated Nginx config from being read publicly)
• [Low] Leaflet map popup built via DOM API instead of innerHTML template interpolation (eliminates XSS surface on photo.urls.thumb)
• [Low] Leaflet 1.9.4 loaded from unpkg with verified SHA-256 Subresource Integrity hashes and crossorigin="anonymous" — compromised CDN cannot inject code
• [Low] Apple Photos import error messages sanitised — raw WP_Error messages (which can contain filesystem paths from cURL/TLS errors) are no longer returned to the browser

1.0.0

• Initial release
• Grid and masonry layouts
• EXIF extraction and display
• Leaflet.js GPS map
• Manual and smart albums
• Google Photos OAuth2 import
• Apple Photos iCloud Shared Albums import
• Multi-layer image protection (signed URLs, overlays, .htaccess, Nginx rules)
• Server-side GD watermarking
• WebP conversion
• Redis object caching
• Cloudways Nginx config generator
• Tabbed settings page with inline setup guide

Licence

GPL-2.0+