Insert Thumbnail Images In Your Homepage Post Excerpts

Under normal circumstances, if you are not using a theme that comes with the the Customs Filed functions written in, you cannot insert images to your homepage excerpts. Many bloggers likes to show just a small excerpt of their post in the front page by inserting the “read more” command when they write a post or by using available plugins as this method of posting reduces the chances of Google seeing duplicates in your blog. The downside is of course, all html formatting like links and images are automaically excluded when using post excerpts. While the exclusion of the html formattings are not a bg loss, as your readers will click on the  “continue” link to finish reading what you have posted, the loss of images within those short excerpts makes your homepage very dull and boring.

If you know the codes to include, you can make use of the Custom Fields, but even then, it is quite tedious. Unless you know how to make the images auto re-scale to fit into the post excert, you will have to upload 2 images for one post if you decide that you want images in both the single post and in the excerpts. You will have to upload a normal size image for your single post and a thumbnail size image for the excerpts.

This problem is solved with a plugin I found via Weblogtools today. Titled “Thumbnail For Excerpts” this wonderful plugin will insert a thumbnail image within your homepage excerpts with no effort on your side. All you have to do, or should I say, don’t need to do, is to post like usual, insert whatever image into your post like usual and this plugin will detect the image, look for the default thumnail image that WordPress creates for all your images that you have upload, scale it to your preferred size, and insert it into the post excerpts in your blog’s homepage. Really cool.

You can also edit the plugin to increase or decrease the size of the thumnail, change the alignment and if you know a little CSS, you can add things like a border or whatever to the image. Instructions are given for the various adjustments you can make in the author’s plugin page. The only goruse I had with this plugin was the margin between the image and the post, but that is easily taken care of by using the stylesheet.

As per instruction, the styling can be done with the default class, imgtfe, which means what ever variables assigned to this class will effect the look of the thumbnail. So to seperate the image and the post a little bit further from each other, you can assign a small instruction to the imgtfe like thus,

.imgtfe { float: left; margin-right: 10px; }

This will give you a 10 px wide margin between the post and the image and it makes the post excerpt looks neater. If you want to float it to your right, just change the words accordingly.

Get The Thumbnail For Excerpt Plugin

For those who has difficulty getting the right images for their posts, there is another plugin called Photo Dropper. Ultimate Geek Girl did a short review of it and she finds locating and adding pictures to your blog with this plugin can be a real time saver.