Find Thumb Plugin

To Download the “Find Thumb”, Wordpress Plugin CLICK HERE

The problem

Many Wordpress themes, are heavily dependant on “feature images” to use as thumbnails to make them look good. This is great except it adds a lot of extra work setting up these thumb references, but equally if you are in a hurry and forget you add the thumb then the look of the theme breaks.

And the solution

So here is Tui’s Find Thumb plugin. It is very easy to use. It’s purpose is to replace the Image function currently used in your theme with one that is lot more clever. With these new functions available you can do everything from a randomly select an image, or return a URL or IMG tag source specifically for that post.

The post option works through this logic until it gets a result

1. Returns an IMG tag based on the thumbnail set in the post meta data (through special post fields)
2. The first image in the post
3. A randomly chosen image from a directory (in your base images directory) with the same name as the posts first category slug.
4. A randomly chosen image from your base images directory

Ok … Lets install.

First download the plugin and install in the Wordpress plugins folder and of course once uploaded, then activate.

Now go to the settings page for “Find Thumb”

First configure the location of your image folder. Here you need to enter the location of your base folder of images. Each category will have a folder in that location. Images in these can be selected to represent the category topic.

Next the default css class and thumbnail name. If you are using Wordpress, you can almost guarantee you are using css. Here just enter the default class you want to use for images if one isn’t already selected.

In addition if you Theme uses “Feature Thumbnails” then enter it’s name here.

Setup how you want images scaled by default

Once you have the pluggin installed, if you want more information then return to this web page, the link is at the top of the Wordpress options page

Now go lookup your category setup page in word press. You will need to make a note of all the category slugs as each will need an image folder.

Using your ftp client, now create a folder in your main base folder, one for each category. Named after the slug for that category. Create one folder each.

Finally lets start editing the code in your theme

Look for where the images are being inserted. For example from mine, it looked like this…

and this …

Now replace all that with this…

There are 5 funtions that can be accessed through this plugin.

1. tui_findRandomBackgroundSTYLE()
Returns a random image URL from the background images folder if one exists else the base image folder.

2, tui_findRandomThumbURL()
Returns a random image URL from base image folder

3. tui_findRandomThumbIMG(”Height”,”Width”,”Class”,”Title”,”Alt”)
Returns a random image IMG Tage from base image folder

4. tui_findPostThumbURL(”thepostID”)
Returns a URL, having searched based on the postID

5. tui_findPostThumbIMG(”thepostID”,”Height”,”Width”,”Class”,”Title”,”Alt”)
Returns an IMG tag, containing the URL, height, width, alt, title and class, having searched based on the postID

To ask questions, find answers to issues & make requests visit my forum

Development source : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tuis-thumb-finder/download/