Setting featured image for post/page could be very time consuming, especially when your media library holds hundreds of pictures. Very often we select the same thumbnail for posts in particular category. Wouldn't be much easier to have a thumbnail being set automatically when we choose a category while creating or updating posts/pages? I could not find in wordpress.org repository any plugins doing exactly what I wanted and decided to write my own. It started as a plugin just for myself. Exactly 12 lines of code. Then I decided to share it with others. And here it is - FPW Category Thumbnails. Click on a link above this post to see the plugin in WordPress repository.
Hi Frank, Great Plugin! I’ve being trying to work out if this could be modified to take a random image from a nng gallery so you get a different image for each posing within a category and that the same image be inserted to the post as the featured image? Any ideas?
Thanks Gareth. I’m sorry but what you want to accomplish is rather non-standard. The plugin supports a standard approach to thumbnails. It will eventually be expanded to support multiple images per post/page if it belongs to multiple categories. What you want can be done but it will require a brand new plugin to handle it.
I love the plugin. It has been great. For some reason I cannot figure out how to have a thumbnail automatically added to the home page slideshow with the post when I post it. Instead, I have to post then go into the plugin settings and apply mapping for it to show up, otherwise it is the default theme thumbnail image. I am new to this, so I am assuming this is a simple fix and I am just a little behind. Thank you in advance.
Hi Garrett. Which version of Custom Community theme do you use? Is it Free or Pro version. I’ve tested it with free version and cannot recreate this behavior. Try to disable all plugins except FPW Category Thumbnails and try to post then. If this problem goes away then it means that one of your plugins is conflicting with mine on saving of the post. Re-enable plugins one by one repeating posting at each step. If the problem reappears the last re-enabled plugin causes it.
Thank you so much! I will give this a try. I have the free version of Custom Community.
The plugin works great, exactly what I need for my new site (which has quite a few different categories) when I ‘push the button,’ but it does not insert thumbnails when another plugin creates posts from RSS feeds.
Is there any way to use a cron job (or anything else) to force the plugin to apply mapping at a set interval? Seems to fail when there are multiple posts being generated at the same time. I think my other plugin is using ‘insert post….’
Hi Jim. Try to modify the plugin which inserts posts. After successful insertion add:
if ( class_exists( ‘fpwCategoryThumbnails’ ) ) {
$post = get_post( $id );
fpwCategoryThumbnails::addThumbnailToPost( $id, $post );
}
Hello Frank, Great Plugin.
The images I assigned to a category is not showing up on the associated post because my Theme (Newspaper Time) by Magazine3 Thumbnail Setting is Timthumb Script – This setting enables all the attached images on the posts to show.
Changing the setting to Native Thumbnail enables Featured Images to show, hence, your Plugin works,
Any workaround?
Thanks in advance.
As I’ve stated many times before my plugin does not display thumbnails leaving it to the themes. Of course by modifying your theme you can get what you want. It is hard for me to give you any sound advice as I don’t have this theme.
Regards,
Frank
I’m creating posts through XML-RPC (via ifttt.com) and the thumbnail doesn’t get set. If I edit the post manually after it’s been created, the thumbnail is then set, but I can’t/won’t be editing every post created this way. Any way this plugin can work on posts created via XML-RPC?
Hi Joe,
The problem was in my plugin not mapping when in user context. Posts created via XML-RPC use this context. Problem fixed in version 1.5.4.
Hi Frank,
Firstly, congratulations on a great plugin, it has really added a great deal of value to our site.
I have one query/question. We have a syndication program running to add our posts from our own blogs. We use a signature category (JC or JH etc) to apply the thumbnail. What is confusing me is that sometimes the thumbnail is hyperlinked (desired) and sometimes not. I can’t seem to figure out the pattern.
You can see the issue by visiting this link: http://internettimealliance.com/wp/blog/ – The last three thumbnails are not hyperlinked then the next 3 are, then 1 not… and so on. Is there a setting to make all the thumbnails linked?
Thanks in advance.
Paul
Hi Frank,
After some more investigation I discovered:
1) If a syndicated post arrives the thumbnail is not automatically linked.
When I go to ‘edit post’ the thumbnail option for ‘Link to post’ is selected. If I pull down the dropdown and select the ‘Link to post’ again, then update the post the thumbnail becomes linked.
2) If I create a post from within Wordpress the thumbnail is automatically linked.
When I first set up the plugin and mapped the images, it must have auto linked (some if not all) the thumbnails. On remapping, and having tried various options, I can’t seem to get Wordpress to link them.
Any tips, much appreciated.
Kind regards,
Paul