Post-Thumb Revisited automatically creates and displays thumbnails for posts.
The plugin scan posts for images. Then, it can do the followings:

• Loop display: show a thumbnail linked to the post.
• Sidebar display: it can shows thumbnails from the most recent posts or thumbnails from random posts.

All thumbnails are dynamically created when needed and then saved. So, there is no complex thumbnail management.
The nice Highslide javascript library is included in the plugin. It adds nice expansion effect to each link/thumbnail created by post-thumb revisited.
So, Post-Thumb revisited is a thumbnail management system.
Install the plugin, and then, you can add a thumbnail display in the Loop by a simple function:

This will show the thumbnail of the first picture in the post for each post in the Loop.
Or you can add a list of your most recent posts represented by a thumbnail in the sidebar with:

Or one or more random posts in the same way:

Once you’ve done this, you do not have to care anymore about thumbnails!
For instance, if you want to change thumbnail size site-wide, just delete the thumbnails on your server, change the settings…done. Next time a page will be loaded, thumbnails will be updated automatically.
Images can be anywhere: anywhere on your server, on a remote server, on FlickR,…

Two levels of customizing

The plugin is highly configurable. You can set the parameters in the option screen for the entire site, or change them locally in any function call your theme template may contain.
A lot of settings are available to help you manage thumbnails exactly the way you want:

• save name: all thumbnails are save in a folder. You can decide what name to use.
• Quality: the quality of thumbnails can be set.
• Additionnally, a sharpness mask can be applied to further improve quality.
• Rounded corners can be applied to thumbnails
• You can add text in the thumbnail
• Javascript library: in addition, Highslide JS or Thickbox can be used to display image or media.

With this, you can manage how your blog shows just like you wish.

Simple example

First line will display the first post of category 1 with a size of 180×120. The save name will first_image.xxx.
Second line will display the 6 following posts of category 1 with a size of 50×50. The save name will main_image.xxx.

Additionnal features

By adding rel=”thumb” to a picture link, you can create and add automatically a thumbnail to any picture in posts.
Highslide: using highslide adds many interesting features:

• you can automatically add an expand link to each thumbnail/picture.
• You can automatically play youtube video in an expanded frame
• In connection with wordTube, you can play mp3/flv in expanded frames
• With these options checked, video, mp3 and youtube are acting just like a picture (thumbnail and link)
• Isn’t that better than the ugly players you usually see everywhere?

Thickbox (a javascript library including lightbox) will soon be available as an alternative to highslide.
You can find more updated informations, and project follow-up at the trac: Post-Thumb trac

Formatting display

Post-Thumb uses only standard html code. So, all formatting will go through css. If needed, some tags or classes can be added to the thumbnails.

Online documentation

This entry was posted on Vendredi, mai 2nd, 2008 at 21:21 and is filed under Default. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.