A new web site — Photocrati implementation issues

This is a continuation of a series of posts about reworking my website into one that is entirely WordPress based. The series starts here:

A new web site – general requirements

Up to now, my plan was to integrate the underwater pictures at the existing php-based web site with the ones from the new WordPress-based one. The purpose of that split was to save work, and to avoid having to figure out how to show captions and descriptions with each photograph, since the present set of underwater galleries features a lot of explanatory text.

Here’s an example from the present site (I’d link to it, but it’s not going to be around for long if this all works out):

I brought some of the images from the current site into the NextGEN gallery system, and found the only gallery that seems to display the captions and descriptions, NEXTGen Pro Slideshow. It has tow options for displaying that information, each of which is problematical for me. Here’s one, with the captions and descriptions below the image:

Where are the caption and description? They are there, but in a color so close to the color of the background that they are illegible.

There’s another option: to have the captions and descriptions float over the image:

Now you can read them, but you can’t see the image. If you click on the image in either mode, you get the image without a captioning and absent a description.

But there’s something that is tantalizingly close to what I want. Actually, it’s pretty much exactly what I want, except the user has to do something to get there. If you click on the tiny cartoon balloon icon at the bottom right of the caption, you get a comments page that looks like this:

If you click the X at the upper right of the comments pages, you get this:

This is pretty much what I want. Caption in bold. Line between caption and description. Description left-justified. Filmstrip underneath.

If you click on the left-hand icon next to the balloon, you directly to that view:

It turns out that you can get to this display from almost any Pro Gallery, but I know of no way for it to be the thing that the viewer first sees when she lands on a gallery page. There’s gotta be a way to do that, I think. That gives me some comfort.

A few other things I’m having trouble with:

• The sidebar calendar widget doesn’t look right with sidebar fonts over 12 or 13 pixels, but if I make the font that small it’s hard to read.
• I can’t figure out how to get more post excerpts included on the summary page that’s the blog home page. On The Last Word, the archives widget in the sidebar is so long that the displayed web page goes much farther than the end of the excerpts. [Edit 10/2: Fixed. This setting is in the WordPress Settings menu.]
• I can’t figure out how to get more than one paragraph in a description.