Bulk featured image edit with custom post type

Bulk actions like that are intended to run automatically. While user interaction may be possible, it’s beyond the intended scope. I’m unsure what will happen, if anything, if the script is interrupted for user interaction.

It seems to me a more appropriate way to invoke featured image operations would be to add an action link under each post in the list table, where the edit, quick edit, etc. links are. Since user interaction is required anyway, I don’t see this as any less convenient than the bulk actions and this approach is a much better fit to the conventional WP user interface.

Because these are links, you’ll need a page to go to (or perhaps a JS popup?) that puts up an interface for the user to select an image from. The selection can be set as the post’s featured image by sending an Ajax request to the server. The page can then redirect back to the posts list screen so the user can easily select the next post where another featured image will again be added or changed.

The posts list screen also has a messaging system that you can utilize to display status messages regarding the last operation.

Hi bcworkz,

Thank you very much for your reply!

Your comments are indeed very true; but my request would be a little easier than that :D.

I don’t need to interact with the code. I only need to set the SAME feature image for like, 50 posts, and if necessary, updates them altogether with another image some time later. I think it is exactly what bulk action does, except the “custom type” would be feature image.

I did not see the feature image as a post-meta in the plugin’s documentation so i am not sure if I just add ‘feature image’ in the csv would work or not.

I apologize for not making my question very clear and I would really appreciate any follow up or a simple yes-or-no.

Thanks.

Wouldn’t selecting a single image still be “interaction”? Or would it always be the same such that it could be hard coded or set as an option in settings somewhere? Bulk actions run as server side PHP. I suppose some sort of interactivity might be possible through a series of redirects that ultimately end up back at the original posts list screen. One way to find out if this would work is to simply try it ??

The way the default bulk actions work is a redirect is done, passing a particular action parameter along with selected post IDs. The work is done on this new page, then another redirect back to the original posts list with a message parameter directing what message to display. It’s actually all the same page with default actions, just different action parameters, but different pages are easily accommodated.

We should conceivably be able to do this work in the bulk action callback without any redirects until the final messaging posts list. Some people have had difficulty getting code to work as expected this way. I’ve not been able to determine why. Since your need is fairly simple, doing it within the callback would be worth a try. Just don’t be surprised if it doesn’t work despite impeccable code. If so, reconfigure to go through redirects.

To set a featured image for a post, you need the post’s ID, which is passed to your callback, and the image attachment ID, which you get from where ever you have it specified — hard code, settings, user interaction etc. Then set the post’s post meta (key “_thumbnail_id”) value to the attachment ID.

Hard code is what I meant! Sorry for the confusion.

I will have the image-id ready for use and all I do I guess is to assign “image-id” to the post_meta “feature-image”.

No worries, I’m perpetually confused! ??

Yes, that’s all there is to adding a featured image to a post. Depending on the behavior you want, you might want to use update_post_meta(). It avoids any chance of adding multiple entries, but it will overwrite any existing values. To avoid any overwrites, use add_post_meta() while passing true as the 4th parameter. This also prevents multiple entries, but will not overwrite.

?? Thank you! I will try it out when I got the chance!

NP. To be clear, the post meta key to set is _thumbnail_id (if two different spaces appear in that, they are really underscores, they don’t always appear correctly). Not “feature-image” as you said a while back. I was agreeing the concept was that simple, not that the specific key was correct.

Featured images were originally called “thumbnails” but was soon changed due to confusion with image size names. The term in code was never changed. I guess coders are not supposed to be confused by ambiguity ??