Feature request regarding titles

Your’re right, the post ID is shown just to display something at all. What about a text like “(no title)” instead?

Thanks for the suggestion, and feel free to make that change for other people who might be using your plugin, but I would find that to be nearly as annoying as the number ID showing. In fact, the display of “No Title” is exactly the reason I wanted to use your plugin with the option of having thumbnails rather than the default one that wordpress has that will show “No Title”. If conditional formatting to only show titles when there actually is one isn’t feasible, then I guess I will have to go without and only use thumbnails and possibly excerpts, but that isn’t the most preferable for me.

Omitting posts with no title is possible. I’m pondering about such an option. Why are there posts without any title?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 1 month ago by Martin Stehle. Reason: Corrected typos

I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding you, but if omitting posts with no title means that they wouldn’t show up in the plugin at all, that is not what I was asking for. I don’t want any posts omitted. I simply want an option to not display any title in the plugin if the post doesn’t have a title rather than a placeholder ID number or “no title” showing up.

Let’s say that I have thumbnails and excerpts enabled, and also an option for only displaying the title when the post contains a title. Posts A and B have titles, so titles would be displayed along with a thumbnail and excerpt. Post C doesn’t have a title so for that post only the thumbnail and excerpt would show without a placeholder title.

As for why there would be posts with no title, depending on the type of content, a title might be superfluous or unnecessary. And example might be that some of my posts will be of inspirational quotes. I honestly can’t think of how to title them other than making the title the first few words of the quote followed by the person that said it. This is quite redundant since all of that will be within the body of the post and I’d rather it just not have a title.

While I’m understaning your reasons for omitting a post title, I still recommend to use post titles. Post titles are an important part of a website to provide orientation for the users. Post titles are not only used on a post page, but also in the page title, in bookmarks as description, on search result pages, and on archive pages, so that the user can distinguish the pages.

If you want to omit post titles for the quotation posts, then I recommend to use another template which does not display the post title, but you’d rather still provide a title for the other contextes a page is used.

I’m still hesistating to implement your desired option, since a missing post title can lead to no link at all if also the thumbnail is missing.

I appreciate your concern, but honestly with the type of content I’m going to be posting it would be very undesirable to have to come up with titles for each and every post and it’s more than just quotes that I wouldn’t want to have titles on. That was merely only one example. I do not want titles to show up on the archive pages either if it’s a post that I’d prefer not to have a title on, or on any widgets. However, I can, and am willing to create custom url slugs for each post, for bookmarking purposes, but that doesn’t mean I actually want that displayed as the title anywhere on the site. As for the archive page, featured images will show up there to help users distinguish between pages, so I can definitely include those. I also have a plugin that will show featured images in the post manager in the backend so I can more easily manage posts without titles.

You do include a warning for the option of not displaying post titles at all that you should include a default thumbnail for posts without a thumbnail, so I don’t see why the same thing couldn’t apply? Though I believe you can set the option to turn the excerpts into links as well, so a thumbnail might not be absolutely necessary if excerpts were included with the link option selected. In any case, as far as I can currently anticipate, the posts that generally wouldn’t have titles would have images that could be used as thumbnails, and this includes the quote posts (I have to turn them into images for use on certain social media sites like Instagram/Pinterest).

If you decide that including such an option is not in the best interest of your general userbase, then that is of course your decision as it is your plugin. However, not including such an option is not going to convince me to include titles on each and every post. As I said, I would simply use the option to not display any titles at all. I might possibly take a screen shot of the titles on posts that have them to include as a thumbnail, but that is an extra step that I’d prefer not to waste time on.

Perhaps I should rethink the idea of even having a recent posts widget at all. It does seem to take up a fair amount of space on the side bar, even if I only limit it to three posts, though there may be other places on the website where it would be more appropriate.

Since you’re thinking a lot about the posts list, I recommend you to try my other posts list plugin Ultimate Post List. It has more options, and you can place it both in widget areas and post contents.

Thank you for for the suggestion. While, I’m not sure I feel it would it would be ideal to place a recent posts list inside the posts themselves (I’d prefer more a list of related posts for that area) I’ll take a look at your other plugin if I do figure out a more ideal place on my website to put a list of recent posts.