Version 1.6 of my WooCommerce extension, Gallery Captions for WooCommerce, is now live with two new features: HTML is allowed in captions and image thumbnails can now have captions, (if you really want them to).
Basic HTML in Captions
Some support requests have come in since the launch of Gallery Captions for WooCommerce asking how to add links, and occasionally other formatting, to captions. Now people no longer have to ask, they can just add HTML. I’m using the built-in $allowedtags variable in WordPress to allow most formatting tags but not big structural tags that have the potential to break the product image gallery.
Captions on Thumbnails
A while ago there was a support request asking to for a way to add captions to the thumbnails displayed below the full-size image in the product gallery, and instead of saying that’s not how the extension works I made it work and gave the customer a development version of Gallery Captions with captions on the thumbnails with the version number 1.6-dev. In order to release 1.6 without breaking that customer’s site when the extension updates I added thumbnail captions to the release version, but hid it behind a filter. Most of the time it doesn’t make sense to have captions on thumbnails, but when it does site owners can now filter gcw_show_thumbnail_captions to return true and they’ll get thumbnail captions, like this:
add_filter( 'gcw_show_thumbnail_captions', '__return_true' );
Both of these changes have the potential to cause trouble by letting people break the image gallery in unexpected ways, so hopefully I’m not making a mistake. Putting thumbnail captions behind a filter that should restrict the use of thumbnail captions to people who really know what they’re doing, and limiting the amount of HTML allowed in captions should prevent the worst disasters, and I can always limit it more in the future if needed.