Thanks to Mike Berg for showing me this!
A few years ago I hacked the WP core to enable gallery display of PDFs, word documents, and other non-image file types (Make WordPress gallery display pdf’s and other non-image file types, Make WP gallery display non-image files, independent of file type). I had a number of requests to create a plugin to achieve the same. Well, it turns out that the FIle Gallery plugin displays various file types and does even more!
The funny thing is, I had already been using File Gallery — but only in order to display galleries of selected images. I never had reason to display a gallery of PDFs on this site, so I never knew that the plugin could handle non-image file types! I’m so glad it does — it’s a great plugin for my needs, it has been well-supported with updates in my experience, and the additional mime type support is a sweet bonus.
Hacking the core file was an easy fix for my needs, but for anyone who doesn’t want to do that, use File Gallery!
I’m glad I never tried making a plugin; I can’t imagine how many people would start asking for tech support. That’s better left to someone with more skills, experience, and time!!!