Cover photo application for WPPA gallery

A link please…

Here is the link to the post with the gallery of thumbnails, this displays correctly –

https://photographyintro.com/wp/?p=238

And here is the main blog index of posts –

https://photographyintro.com/wp/?page_id=2

As the Cover image does not show there I had to append the title with “-click here to see photos-” so the user would have a clue to getting to the gallery post!

You do not need to make an index of posts and a post for every album.

If the parents of all albums is set to —none— ( the default ) you can simply put %%wppa%% or [wppa][/wppa] in a single post. This will produce a list of albums like https://wppa.opajaap.nl/my-album/

Set links: Table VI-B1: same as title, and Link type on the Album Admin -> Edit Album Information screen to ‘the album photos as slideshow’ and Link to to -the same page or post-. If you select a different page, make sure it has %%wppa%% or [wppa][/wppa] in its content.

Ah. But I DO want each album to appear separately in the main post list index! I was not aware that this was not common practice.

In that case, make each posts content like this:

%%wppa%% %%cover=56%% (where 56 is the album number)

or [wppa type="cover" album="56"][/wppa]

Ok, I have made those changes. The main post index still does not show the Cover thumbnail, even though I also reduced the Cover image size to the minimum, 50px.

And the detail page for the post shows only the Cover thumbnail, an additional mouse click is needed to see the actual gallery. I was trying to avoid 2 click navigation.

Random thought: could the issue be how the Kippis theme creates the post excerpts for the main index?

Post excerpts do not process shortcodes.
This is another reason why you are taking the wrong approach…

an additional mouse click is needed to see the actual gallery.

If you want to open the thumbnail view use [wppa type="album" album=".."][/wppa], if you want the slideshow use [wppa type="slide" album="18"][/wppa]

Shoot. Now we seemed to be locked into a circular argument. So on a hunch I tried 6 other themes. 5 out of the 6 displayed the Cover image in the excerpt on the main post index correctly! So this issue was with the Kippis theme all along. My apologies for putting you through all this trouble.

Kelly

OOPS! You’re right about the excepts not running short codes. My trial above appeared to give a successful result because 5 out of 6 themes were simply listing the full posts, not excerpts!

I shall have to withdraw into deep contemplation now . . .

To help you contemplating, i will confuse you a little bit more with the following info:

You should also be aware of a clumsy thing in wp:

A theme can call the_excerpt() to produce the excerpt.
A theme can call the_content() to produce the content.
the_excerpt() does not render shortcodes, BUT if no explicit excerpt is entered in the post/page editor, the_excerpt() uses the_content() to make an excerpt. Shortcodes are not rendered in that case.

[wppa][/[wppa] is a shortcode.
%%wppa%% is NOT a shortcode.

%%wppa%% is rendered ONLY AFTER wp_head() (this MUST be in the themes header.php) is executed. This makes it possible to have excerpts in metatags that do not preliminary produce images at the very top of the page.

So, [wppa][/wppa] is ignored in metatags, %%wppa%% is not rendered in metatags because wp_head() is not executed yet.

But, first you need chaos before you can create a great thing.

Wow! Very nice of you to spell all that out for me. If only WP’s docs made this stuff easy to find.

Many thanks