How It Works
Where the gallery appears on your store, why block themes need one extra step, and how it handles quick view and variations.
Smart Product Gallery doesn't add a gallery to your products. It takes the place of FluentCart's own gallery. That's why you never upload images to the plugin. It uses the images you've already added to each product in FluentCart, and shows them the way you've set up under FluentCart → Product Gallery.
Those settings are global. One configuration styles the gallery on every product in your store. You can't give one product a grid and another a slider. That's a deliberate trade-off: you set it up once, and new products look right the moment you publish them.
How the gallery gets onto the page depends on the kind of theme you use.
Classic themes: automatic
A classic theme is a traditional WordPress theme, the kind you customize under Appearance → Customize and not in a Site Editor. Astra, Hello Elementor, GeneratePress and most themes from before 2022 are classic themes. On one of these there's nothing to set up. FluentCart builds each product page itself, Smart Product Gallery draws its gallery in place of FluentCart's, and you see the new gallery the moment you activate the plugin. Classic themes in detail →
Block themes: one extra step
A block theme is a theme you edit with the Site Editor (Appearance → Editor), like Twenty Twenty-Four or Twenty Twenty-Five. Here FluentCart draws product pages from a Single Product template, a saved layout made of blocks. That template contains FluentCart's own Product Gallery block, which Smart Product Gallery can't replace on its own. So until you swap that block for Smart Product Gallery's Product Gallery block, your products keep FluentCart's original gallery. You do the swap once, and it takes about two minutes. Why, and how to swap it →
Page builders
If you build product pages with Elementor, Divi, Bricks or Oxygen, it depends on how your template is put together:
- If the template shows the product's content (a Post Content widget or similar), FluentCart builds the product area. The gallery then appears automatically, just as on a classic theme.
- If the template uses the builder's own product-gallery element, or you've laid the page out by hand, add a Shortcode element with
[smart_product_gallery].
The shop's quick-view pop-up
On FluentCart's shop pages, a product with options shows a View Options button. Clicking it opens a quick-view pop-up so shoppers can pick a size or color without leaving the list. Smart Product Gallery loads its own gallery into that pop-up too, so the look stays the same from the shop to the product page. There's nothing to switch on. Quick View Pop-up →
Variations
A variation is one version of a product, such as the blue one or the size 10. In FluentCart, each variation can have its own images.
Smart Product Gallery adds those variation images to the gallery after the product's main images. When a shopper picks a variation, the gallery narrows to that variation's images, so the photos match what they're about to buy. General → Gallery Image Source controls whether shoppers first see every image or only the variation images. Variation Images →
What it doesn't do
So you know where the edges are:
- No per-product settings. One layout and one style for the whole store.
- No video in the gallery. It shows the product's images only.
- It doesn't touch your images. Nothing is cropped, re-uploaded or changed in your Media Library. The settings only change how the images are displayed.
Where to go next
- Quick Start — set your first layout
- Block Editor & Site Editor — the block, in detail
- Layouts Overview — choose a layout