How to Create a Business Website

Thumbnail Catcher Pro

One of the most attractive layout features in Thesis Theme for WordPress are teasers. They look perfect on a page just under a couple of latest featured posts on your home page. And the best one, is that you may have thumbnails be displayed in those smaller post boxes. Well, while this feature was available in thesis long time before wordpress added post thumbnail support, the DIYthemes “proper” way to set up those thumbnails may be quite a challenge for a new wordpress user (as you have to set up either thesis post image field by copy-pasting image links or copy-paste link directly to the thumbnail input field, well that sucks in 2011).

On the other hand, you have a lot of people migrating to Thesis from other wordpress themes for its SEO improvements and flexibility. Imagine you have moved your active blog with hundreds of posts to thesis… you would spends days to copy-paste those image links in order to benefit from teaser feature.

Another case where this plugin is extremely useful, is when your posts have no image at all or the user just refuses to copy-paste manually the links into thesis post image boxes (I do understand those people, clicking buttons is so quicker) and inserts the images directly into post content. In this case, to preserve the thumbnails in teasers, a custom function to pull those images out of post content or suggest a default thumbnail would be perfect!

Thumbnail Catcher Pro plugin was born

This plugin does exactly what is needed. Here is the list of its features :

Adds a new input in media setting to configure the default thumbnail
While posts are displayed it checks if thesis is capable to generate teaser thumbnail
If yes, thumbnail catcher stays silent
Else, the plugin scans the post content to see if there are any available images and generates thumbnail from the first one
Or generates the thumbnail from the default thumbnail image in case the post do not have images (or they are outside your domain)
Adds the generated thumbnail to the exact place in teaser so that it looks as if thesis did it
No headache with php/css/html codes

And the best one, this plugin is not regular plugin… it is just several custom functions in one downloadable file without any bloated code. That’s how we like thesis plugins.

How to install Thumbnail Catcher Pro

Once you have completed your payment, you will be mailed the download link. Download the zip file and install it as any other plugin via your admin pannel (Dashboard -> Plugins -> Add New -> Upload -> Browse -> Select zip file -> Send) and activate it ( … -> Activate)

Then, go to your media library and find an image you would like to use as default thumbnail. Click the “edit” link next it. You will get a similar screen :

Copy the full URL to the default thumbnail image

Copy the link as on screenshot and go to your media settings (Dashboard -> Settings -> Media) and paste that image URL into the default thumbnail URL field as on screenshot below :

Paste your link in this setting field (otherwise plugin will refuse to work )

Here you go! Your teasers are ready.

Here is an example of plugin work on Becky’s website : Becky Joy fine Artist , or another one on Mike’s photography website here : Michael Boyd Photography.

What clients say

I recently had to move a huge blog over to Thesis theme. With almost 1300 posts, I had figured it would take a full week’s work to go in and set each post image individually, to get thumbnails to show up in teasers. Serge, your Thumbnail Catcher Pro plugin has made me very happy. It did the job in under 3 minutes – upload, install, activate, one setting – done!

Rebecca Leaman

Thumbnail Catcher Pro is an extremely valuable plugin for anyone migrating to the Thesis theme from another theme. You have made my life so much easier by “automagically” making featured images into Thesis thumbnails. Thank you so much!!!

Julie Wolpers