Adding Thumbnails to Featured Posts

Both the ‘Recently Featured’ and ‘Latest Entry’ sections have built in functionality for displaying thumbnail images on the home page next to each excerpt. This is done by using a custom field within individual posts.

Adding a thumbnail of your choice is easy. Here’s how:

• Beneath the Write post panel (assuming you’re running 2.5) you’ll see a drop-down heading called Custom Fields. Click the arrow to see its contents.

• Create a custom field with a key called lead_img.
• Assign a value to that key, which in this case would be the name of the image you want to use. You do not need to enter a full path as it is already coded into the index.php file. (example: feature_image.jpg).
• You only need to create a key once, but multiple values can be assigned to it. So for any other posts you want to display a thumbnail for, just select your existing key from the drop-down box and give it a new value.
• Click the ‘Add Custom Field’ button, and save your changes.

Because this data is saved with the post, you can go back to change that value any time, or add/edit/delete a key as well.

The default path of the script points to the /images/thumbs/ folder. Be sure to save the images to that location if you don’t want to include the full path. The dimensions are 230×80 pixels. I recommend sticking to that size or smaller.