With the Santa hat on, Matt Mullenweg has decided to try out an experiment specifically for plugin authors and their respective plugin pages. He’s decided to give plugin authors a little more control with regards to how their plugin pages look by offering them a chance to upload a 772 x 250 pixel image that will be used as a banner. Here are a couple of excellent examples of this experiment in action:
One thing that I am thankful for is that most of the images I’ve seen have not detracted away from the information presented on the page. Right now, there is consistency amongst all of the various plugins hosted on the repository. I want that consistency to stick around. However, I will say that some of the plugin banner images give the page an additional pop and enhance the offering. As long as the header images are somewhat nice to look at and relevant to the plugin, I support this change!
Shared by Ozh on Twitter, image consisting of the ingredients necessary to turn an original logo into something that’s different but still retains some of the original characteristics. Can anyone figure out what’s wrong with the WordPress image?
Who doesn’t love a good infographic? Oli from WPLift.com has gone through the work of collecting all of the infographics related to WordPress that have been released so far this year into one long post. What’s neat about seeing all of these images on one page is the diversity in displaying relatively the same information. Also, quite a few of these would make for a good poster to hang on the wall. ∞
Sucuri Security has a great post that begins to review the aftermath of the massive exploitation of the TimThumb image re sizer script. According to their calculations, about a million pages have been compromised by the script but when filtering down their results for the past thirty days, there were over 200,000 results. The exploitation of the script is still an ongoing problem and will most likely continue to be for the foreseeable future. If you think an old version of the TimThumb script is on your server, use the TimThumb vulnerability scanner plugin.
The TimThumb exploitation event is interesting in that so many websites became compromised despite the issue not being relevant to the core of WordPress itself. I wonder if there are any other popular scripts or dependencies that plugins or themes use that could end up in the same situation? ∞
Occasionally, I ‘ll take a look through the WordPress Ideas site to see what kind of activity is going on. The other night, I discovered an idea that immediately lit the light bulb over my head, mostly because I couldn’t believe that it was not already a feature in WordPress. Approximately one year ago, Jeremy Clarke submitted the idea to allow URLs to be inserted into image captions with the primary goal of making it easy to attribute images to their source. I’ve personally come across the issue where instead of applying the image credits within the image caption, I have to add a note somewhere within the post which is stupid since image captions are the PERFECT spot for attribution. Fast forward to October 18th, 2011 with WordPress 3.3. knocking on the door and this ability is still not present within WordPress. However, there are a couple of things that point to this feature being added soon as the status for the idea is marked Good Idea! We’re Working On It. There is also a ticket in trac, #18311 that has a patch but is currently awaiting review.
While there is not a native, user-friendly way of adding links to image captions, there are a couple of ways in which it can be accomplished. The first is by using ‘ instead of ” when entering the code for your link. However, when switching between the code and visual editors, the link is erased leaving text in place of the link.
Second, you can try using the code provided by Kaspars of Konstruktors.com inside of your functions.php file which will add a “Source URL” field to every image that is uploaded through the WordPress media library. When using this method, it’s important to note that the source URL will be visible only if you specify an image caption upon inserting the image. If implemented correctly, it will look something like this.
Third, you can try using the Links In Captions Plugin by Zack Katz. After activation, you can add links to captions via the following format: {link url=”http://www.example.com”}Anchor text here{/link} Two benefits to this plugin is that it has support for the Target and Rel attributes and you can use shortcodes within the caption area.
Personally, I think Kaspars solution is the most user-friendly after the functions.php file is setup correctly. I’d like to see him package that as a plugin so more users can take advantage of it as it looks as though it was part of the media manager all along. However, the best scenario is for this functionality to some how end up within the core of WordPress. If you have the know-how, please consider contributing to the ticket or writing a better patch to get this into core.
WPBeginner has an excellent tutorial that describes how to use the built in functions of WordPress to generate additional image sizes for use in themes. This is possibly a better alternative than using TimThumb. ∞
WordPress blog owners can install the free WordPress plugin WP-Smush.it that uses Yahoo’s Smush.it service to reduce the size of images. The plugin works automatically in the background: It sends all uploaded images to Yahoo’s image compression service and uploads that optimized version to the server, instead of the unoptimized original version.
Smush.it definitely looks like an interesting service to quickly optimize your page loading speeds with shrunken images. However, it’s a pity you can’t perform a batch optimization for multiple images within the plugin although there is a roundabout way of doing it.
Randy Hoyt demonstrates how to use many of the image-related features and functions in WordPress: * configuring your media settings for your theme * using gallery shortcodes * the mysterious “Post URL” button explained * template files for attachments * adding featured images to your theme * using get_posts to display attachments.
Previous to WordPress having post thumbnails built in, there was a script called TimThumb. I know quite a few themes that integrated TimThumb in order to automatically generate post thumbnails instead of relying on the old method of using a custom field. Ben Gillbanks has chronicled the short history of TimThumb.
Development was started by Tim (hence the name) one of the programmers at Category4 where Darren worked. Shortly after the release of Mimbo Pro, with Tims blessing, we decided to open source the code releasing TimThumb on Google code, and that’s when everyone else started using it. Nowadays 95% of the premium themes teams are offering TimThumb support – and it’s a great feeling, knowing so many are making use of code I worked on.
The article was published in 2009 but I was fooled because I saw it as a recent submission on WPVote.com. Still worthy of a good read though.
I fired up my local server today and installed the latest version of WordPress 2.9 and was surprised to see the basic image editing tools already available in the media library. I decided that the best way to display them in action was through video which also gave me another reason to open up CamtasiaStudio. In the video, I show off each individual tool as well as provide feedback on the crop tool as at this stage, does not appear to be user friendly. But, it’s very early in the development stage so it will most likely be better once it hits the public’s hands. Check out the video.
