Disco Liam

The second in my tutorial (ish) posts. If I write a third, Ill make it a new category and add it to the main menu. One of the new features of WordPress 2.9 is Post Thumbnails. Basically an image associated with every post and page on your site. Before you go any further I suggest you read Mark Jaquith’s post “New in WordPress 2.9: Post Thumbnail Images“, as I’ll be skipping to the end and telling you how I implemented it on this blog.

Adding a picture for every post is something Ive just started doing for this blog, and plan to for every new post that goes on it. I was uploading a pre-cropped image to WordPress, grabbing the URL and putting that in a custom field for that post. Pain. In. The. Arse. Using Post Thumbnails means I can just upload a new image for each blog post, set it as my thumbnail, and WordPress will go ahead and crop it all for me. Easy. The beauty comes when looking at the portfolio.

I was using an identical system for images in my portfolio. This has also been replaced by post thumbnails. I created two extra sizes. 1) the size of my thumbnail on the outer portfolio page, and 2) a large version for the inner portfolio page. I just pull out the correct size and hey presto, now I don’t have to worry about sizing my images. The whole thing improves my work flow dramatically. Now, I can just snap the website using LittleSnapper, uploading that image, click make thumbnail, and boom, all the images I need are sorted. There are a couple of issues though. As Mark mentioned, it only works on newly uploaded photos. This wasn’t a pain for me as I only had 3 I wanted to upload, so I just did them all again, figuring it was less work than installing the plugin that re-size’s them.

I hope that gives some people an idea of how they can use this new feature for more than just adding an image to a post. I’m sure people will come up with much better stuff soon. But for now, I’m pretty happy with what Ive done, and an hours work here as saved me loads in the future. If I keep up with this blogging stuff that is. The hardest part now is finding a suitable image for each post. Can you tell I struggled with this one?