[Plugin: WordPress Popular Posts] Choose your own thumbnails

For the time being, my plugin uses the very first image it finds in your posts to create its thumbnail. There is, however, a small hack you can use!

If you know how to use custom fields, this hack can be of help:

Using a text editor of your choice, open wordpress-popular-posts.php and around line 244 you’ll find this code:

if ($this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['show'] ) {
      // let's try to retrieve the first image of the current post
      $img = $this->get_img($wppost->ID);
      if ( (!$img || empty($img)) || !$this->GD ) {
       $thumb = "";
      } else {
       $thumb = "<a href=\"".get_permalink($wppost->ID)."\" title=\"". htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($tit)) ."\"><img src=\"". get_bloginfo('url') . "/" . PLUGINDIR . "/wordpress-popular-posts/scripts/timthumb.php?src=". $img[1] ."&h=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['height']."&w=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['width']."&zc=1\" alt=\"".$wppost->post_title."\" border=\"0\" class=\"wpp-thumbnail\" "."/></a>";
      }

     }

… change it to:

if ($this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['show'] ) {
      // let's try to retrieve the first image of the current post
      $img = get_post_meta($wppost->ID, 'key_1', true);
      if (empty($img)) {
       $thumb = "";
      } else {
       $thumb = "<a href=\"".get_permalink($wppost->ID)."\" title=\"". htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($tit)) ."\"><img src=\"".$img."\" alt=\"".$wppost->post_title."\" border=\"0\" class=\"wpp-thumbnail\" "."/></a>";
      }

     }

… where ‘key_1’ ( get_post_meta($wppost->ID, ‘key_1’, true); ) is the name of the custom field that stores the path to the image you want to use.

Give it a try and let me know the results.

that didn’t work for me or rather that only looks for the custom field img and not the first image. so i piecemealed it together to form the code below. It’s not very pretty but it works. I also included a default picture if no pic is available.

if ($this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['show'] ) {
       // let's try to retrieve the first image of the current post
      $imgdirectory = get_bloginfo('template_directory') .'/images';
      $customimg = get_post_meta($wppost->ID, 'Image', true);
       if ($customimg != '') {
        $img = $imgdirectory .'/lessons/' . $customimg;
        $thumb = "<a href=\"".get_permalink($wppost->ID)."\" title=\"". htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($tit)) ."\"><img src=\"". get_bloginfo('url') . "/" . PLUGINDIR . "/wordpress-popular-posts/scripts/timthumb.php?src=". $img ."&h=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['height']."&w=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['width']."&zc=1\" alt=\"".$wppost->post_title."\" border=\"0\" class=\"wpp-thumbnail\" "."/></a>";
} else {
      $img = $this->get_img($wppost->ID);
      if ( (!$img || empty($img)) || !$this->GD ) {
       $thumb = "<a href=\"".get_permalink($wppost->ID)."\" title=\"". htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($tit)) ."\"><img src=\"". get_bloginfo('url') . "/" . PLUGINDIR . "/wordpress-popular-posts/scripts/timthumb.php?src=". $imgdirectory ."/ils-small-square.png&h=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['height']."&w=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['width']."&zc=1\" alt=\"".$wppost->post_title."\" border=\"0\" class=\"wpp-thumbnail\" "."/></a>";
      } else {
       $thumb = "<a href=\"".get_permalink($wppost->ID)."\" title=\"". htmlspecialchars(stripslashes($tit)) ."\"><img src=\"". get_bloginfo('url') . "/" . PLUGINDIR . "/wordpress-popular-posts/scripts/timthumb.php?src=". $img[1] ."&h=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['height']."&w=".$this->options_holder[$summoner]['thumbnail']['width']."&zc=1\" alt=\"".$wppost->post_title."\" border=\"0\" class=\"wpp-thumbnail\" "."/></a>";
      }

     }
}

Another problem i found is that a post (which has no other images) with an embedded imeem player is mistaken as an image and then returned as a thumbnail. is there any code to extract only the common image files: jpg, png, gif?

thanks for your help

Well, my plugin looks for <img /> tags in your content via pregmatch. It should be simple to filter out those images that are not jpg, png, etc.

I don’t know the imeem player, how does it work exactly? Is it a flash object?

you can see it here
https://www.ilivesalsa.com/salsa/salsa-music/the-styles-of-salsa-music/

its an embedded flash music player from imeem.com the music sharing service.