GMC Instagram Feed Gallery documentation

Instagram embeds or Graph API feeds with filters, captions, lightbox and CTA.

What this component does

GMC Instagram Feed Gallery belongs to the FuerteventuraTV CMS catalogue and is supported through GMC AI Ticketing. Product package key: pkg_gmc_instagram_feed_gallery.

Requirements

A supported Joomla 5/6 or WordPress install according to the product platform.
PHP 8.1 or newer unless the product page says otherwise.
Administrator access for installation, configuration and update checks.
A valid FuerteventuraTV purchase/licence for paid downloads and private updates.

Daily workflow

Use GMC Instagram Feed Gallery from the CMS backend, not from external SaaS dashboards unless the product explicitly connects to one.
Document the exact page, shortcode, module position or menu item where the output is published.
Keep a small test item published so support can reproduce display and update problems quickly.

Updates and licence checks

Open the CMS administrator and confirm the product version before changing files.
Keep the licence/download id active in the product settings when the component exposes that field.
For Joomla updates use Extensions > Update, click Check For Updates, select the product and run Update.
If the update is not listed, clear the update cache and confirm the update site points to the FuerteventuraTV feed.

Support ticket

Open a support ticket with product name, installed version, domain, order email, licence/download id if available, and the exact error message. The AI assistant must cite this documentation or escalate to a human when the answer is not fully covered.

Installation guide

Use the Joomla or WordPress installation guide linked from the CMS documentation hub. Install the correct ZIP, keep a backup, save the license key when requested and test on a private page before publishing.

Configuration guide

Open the product settings in the CMS administrator area. Check license, roles, cache, privacy, notifications and provider keys only when that product uses an external provider.

User documentation

These notes are written for site owners and editors: first test, daily use, support limits, privacy duties and what to include in a support ticket. They do not require editing source code.

Everything included

76 real features, grouped by area — the full depth of the Instagram Feed Gallery, nothing padded.

Content sources & connection modes

Token-free manual embeds — paste post, reel or TV URLs and get a curated gallery with no access token and no account connection at all.
Graph API account feed — pull a whole Business or Creator account's media automatically through the official Meta Graph API, so the gallery refreshes itself as you post.
Built-in URL validation — only genuine instagram.com post/reel/tv links are accepted; anything else is silently dropped, so a bad paste can't break the page.
Configurable Graph API version, user ID & token — set them from the settings screen; the token travels as an Authorization: Bearer header, never exposed in URLs or logs.

Feed sources & discovery

Multiple feed source modes — pick own, username (another public business profile via business discovery), tagged, or hashtag per gallery.
Multi-account merge (up to 10) — combine several Instagram account IDs into one feed, merged newest-first, de-duplicated by media ID and capped at your item limit.
Per-source tokens — each extra account can carry its own access token; accounts without one fall back to the main token.
Resilient to a dead source — if one account fails it's skipped (serving its own last-good cache when available) while the rest of the feed still renders.
Opt-in, fail-closed hashtag feeds — hashtag mode stays disabled until you explicitly enable it after Meta App Review, preventing accidental misconfiguration.

Layouts & visual styles

Responsive grid or masonry — choose a clean uniform grid or a Pinterest-style masonry layout that adapts to every screen size.
1–8 columns + adjustable gutter — dial in exactly how dense the gallery is, with per-gallery column count and 0–48 px spacing.
Square or natural crop — force uniform square tiles or preserve each post's native aspect ratio.
Full style set — clean, tiles, rounded, polaroid, caption, plus theme-match, showcase and extra built-in presets for specific looks.
YOOtheme / theme-match preset — inherits your active theme's cards, colours, fonts and hover transitions; on Joomla it emits native UIkit markup (uk-card/uk-grid/uk-overlay/uk-lightbox) and falls back gracefully on non-UIkit sites.
Carousel / slider mode — render the theme-match preset as a slider (native UIkit uk-slider with arrows, dots and swipe on Joomla; a self-contained scroll-snap slider on WordPress) instead of a grid.

Showcase preset & engagement

Info-rich showcase style — each tile gets a dark gradient overlay revealing caption, post date and like/comment counts, plus a corner Instagram permalink glyph, replicating premium competitor galleries.
Hover-reveal overlay — the overlay appears on hover rather than always-on, keeping the grid clean until the visitor engages.
Accent & overlay colour pickers — set showcase accent and overlay colours per gallery and as global defaults, with values safely validated before they reach CSS.
Owner like/comment counts — for your own Business/Creator media the gallery shows engagement counts, fetched safely and omitted automatically when Instagram doesn't return them.
Video & carousel-album badges — video tiles carry a play badge and multi-image posts show a child-count badge, so visitors know there's more inside.

Gallery display & interaction

Captions on/off — show or hide each post's caption per gallery.
Built-in local lightbox — full-screen viewer with an info side panel (caption, date, likes/comments, permalink), served from your own site with no external embed script.
Lightbox-off fallback — with the lightbox disabled, tiles link straight to the Instagram permalink so a tap always reaches the original post.
Load More & infinite scroll — start with a configurable page size and let visitors load more on click, or stream in automatically as they scroll.
Content-type tabs — an optional photos, videos, reels tab bar above the grid filters items client-side by media type.
Album filter chips — define Label | keywords albums to render "All + per-album" chips that filter the grid by caption keyword.
Photo/video media filter — show all media, only photos, or only videos.
Text include / exclude — keep or drop posts by case-insensitive caption substring, so you curate exactly which media appears.
Hide specific posts by ID — exclude individual media items you don't want shown, regardless of the feed.
Configurable call-to-action — add a "Follow us" (or any) button with your own label and https link under the gallery.
Gallery heading/title — optional header label above the grid.
Live item count — the header reflects how many items are shown.

Admin & gallery management

Saved-gallery manager — a real back-office component (Joomla) / custom post type (WordPress) storing many reusable galleries, each with its full display configuration.
CRUD + duplicate + copy-shortcode — create, edit, delete, clone a saved gallery and copy its ready-made shortcode in one click.
ID-based embedding — drop a saved gallery anywhere by its id ({gmcinstagramgallery id="N"} / [gmcinstagramgallery id="N"]) instead of repeating every attribute.
Quick-setup presets — start a new gallery from a preset (simple, showcase, carousel, manual) instead of a blank form.
Global vs per-gallery connection — reuse the site-wide Instagram connection by default, or override credentials on a specific gallery.
Collapsed advanced options — day-one fields stay visible; power options tuck into an "Advanced" section to keep the editor approachable.
Live layout preview — an in-admin panel shows columns/style/crop/carousel/albums with placeholder tiles as you change options, so you can sanity-check before saving.
Site-wide display defaults — set default limit, columns, layout, style, gutter, crop, captions, lightbox, page size, infinite scroll, CTA and more, so new galleries and bare shortcodes inherit sensible values.
Joomla ACL permissions — standard Joomla access rules control who can manage galleries.

Connection & setup experience

Guided setup wizard — a step-by-step onboarding flow walks a new site owner through connecting an account.
"Test connection" button — validates the connection live against the Graph API with clear, specific error messages (expired/invalid token, wrong account ID, missing permission, rate limit).
Connect with Instagram (Instagram Login) — log in with Instagram credentials directly, no Facebook Page link required, for any professional account.
Connect with Facebook (Page flow) — the classic Facebook-Login path with a Page picker for accounts linked to a Facebook Page.
Easy Connect (via GMC) one-click OAuth — connect Instagram in a single click without your own Meta developer app; you log in on Instagram's own page and the token returns encrypted, stored only on your site (the GMC relay never keeps it).
Manual token exchange helper — paste a Meta App ID + App Secret and a short-lived token to obtain a permanent Page access token automatically, no manual token extension.
Automatic token renewal — the 60-day Instagram token is refreshed automatically before it expires, so connected feeds keep working without re-authentication.
Token-invalid admin notice — if Instagram returns error 190 the plugin flags the token as invalid and shows an admin warning telling you exactly how to fix it.

Privacy, GDPR & security

Optional local media cache — cache Instagram media on your own domain for a more GDPR-oriented setup, so images and video thumbnails are served from your server, not Instagram's CDN.
Robust video-thumbnail handling — tiles stay visible even when legacy Instagram video thumbnails are missing or expired.
SSRF-hardened cache downloads — local-media caching only fetches from an allowlist of genuine Meta CDN hosts (fbcdn.net, cdninstagram.com, fbsbx.com, akamaihd.net) with content-type validation.
Bearer-header tokens — access tokens travel in an Authorization header, kept out of URLs, query strings and logs.
Whitelisted style/layout tokens & full output escaping — user-supplied style/layout/crop values are validated before reaching CSS class names, and output is escaped throughout — hardened for modern Joomla and current WordPress.
Clean uninstall — WordPress removal cleans up settings, licence data and cached updater metadata.

Performance & caching

Last-known-good feed cache — during a Graph API outage the gallery serves the last successfully fetched media from disk instead of blanking a working page.
Disk-aware media cache — cached images are checked on disk before re-downloading, avoiding a re-fetch of every image on each page view.
Automatic daily cache purge — a scheduled task (WP cron / throttled Joomla purge) deletes stale cached media older than the cache lifetime (min 7 days), so the cache folder doesn't grow unbounded.
Configurable cache lifetime & request timeout — tune how long feeds are cached and how long a Graph request may take.

Internationalisation & compatibility

English, Italian & Spanish out of the box — full UI and front-end strings (admin, wizard, OAuth/Easy-Connect boxes, lightbox, "Load more", album "All" chip) ship translated and compiled.
Multilingual-site aware — respects the site's multilingual setup.
Tested on current CMS — Joomla 5.x/6.x and WordPress 6.0–6.8, PHP 8.1+.

Developer & integration

Four shortcode aliases — gmcinstagramgallery, gmcinstagram, gmcinstagramfeed, gmcphotostream all resolve to the same handler (curly braces on Joomla, square brackets on WordPress).
Rich shortcode attribute set — control everything inline (urls, limit, columns, layout, style, gutter, crop, filters, caption, lightbox, carousel, albums, tabs, colours, source, CTA, title, id…); inline values override stored defaults.
WordPress Gutenberg block — a native block registers the gallery for the block editor alongside the shortcodes.
Joomla content plugin — drop a gallery straight into any article via the bundled content plugin; a bundled system plugin handles the OAuth callback on a clean admin URL.
AJAX endpoints — Load More and the OAuth/connect flows run through the CMS's own AJAX layer.

Trust & licensing

GPLv2 licensed — released under the GNU General Public License v2 or later; you get the official build.
Self-hosted, your data — the gallery and any cached media live on your own site; manual mode involves no third-party service at all, and with Easy Connect the token is stored only on your site.
Licensed one-click updates — the extension checks the GMC / FuerteventuraTV update server automatically (~24 h on Joomla, ~12 h on WordPress) and offers new versions through the native updater while the licence is active.
Download Key delivery — a Download Key arrives by email after purchase and unlocks licensed updates; enter it once on the licence/settings screen.
Graceful licence grace period — if the licence gateway is briefly unreachable, a previously-licensed site keeps working on its last-known-good entitlement; only transport failures are never long-cached, so a blip never poisons the gate.
One-site licence + agency option — each purchase covers one site with updates and support; volume/agency arrangements available on request.
14-day refund + multilingual support — support and refunds handled in English, Italian and Spanish (WhatsApp line included in the licence email).

Joomla & WordPress

Joomla — the theme-match preset emits native UIkit/YOOtheme Pro markup (cards, grid, overlay, slider, lightbox); ships as a package (com_gmc_instagram_feed_gallery component + content plugin + system plugin) with ACL, a Download Key field and the Joomla update server — install only the outer pkg_…zip.
WordPress — equivalent styles are self-contained CSS (no UIkit dependency); saved galleries are a custom post type with a meta-box editor and a Gutenberg block; exposes the per-plugin "Enable auto-updates" toggle and a daily WP-cron cache purge; sold as a separate product from the Joomla edition.

FAQ

Do I need developer access?

No for normal use. Administrator access to the CMS is enough for installation, configuration, updates and first tests.

Can I install Joomla and WordPress packages interchangeably?

No. Use the Joomla ZIP on Joomla and the WordPress ZIP on WordPress. If a product exists on both platforms, follow the guide for that CMS.

Where do I configure license and updates?

Use the product settings or update/licensing screen in the CMS. Paid downloads and private updates require the active FuerteventuraTV license/download key.

What should I send to support?

Send product name, version, CMS, site URL, screenshot, exact error and what you already tried. Do not send passwords, API keys or tokens in the ticket.

GMC Instagram Feed Gallery documentation