using different templates

Thanks for your kind words and for your questions regarding custom style and markup templates. Thanks as well for posting the source text of your shortcode; very helpful.

You have found the Settimgs/Media Library Assistant MLA Gallery Tab, which will let you define your own style and markup templates. To apply your custom template(s) to a specific [mla_gallery] shortcode you must add mla_style and/or mla_markup parameters. For example, if you create a custom style template called my-styles and a custom markup template called my-markup you access them with something like:

[mla_gallery mla_style="my-styles" mla_markup=-"my-markup" attachment_category="traditional" orderby=rand link="file" numberposts=1]

The type parameter in your shortcode example does not affect the markup template (it is used by the Jetpack plugins to select a gallery display type).

Once you get custom markup templates working you can easily define one to suppress the caption. If you want to use mla_caption to suppress the caption the following trick will work:

mla_caption="{+template:({+empty+})+}"

This trick uses a Content Template with parentheses that test for a non-empty value and display nothing if an empty value is found. The {+empty+} substitution parameter doesn’t match any existing value so it is empty and thus suppressed.

I hope that answers your questions about using custom templates and suppressing the item captions. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have any problems or further questions regarding the above suggestions. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.

Thanks for the update with your good news. If there is anything else I can do, let me know.