stephenbaugh

Many WordPress themes, are heavily dependant on “feature images” to use as thumbnails to make them look good. This is great except it adds a lot of extra work setting up these thumb references, but equally if you are in a hurry and forget you add the thumb then the look of the theme breaks.
So here is Tui’s Find Thumb plugin. It is very easy to use. It’s purpose is to replace the Image function currently used in your theme with one that is lot more clever. With these new functions available you can do everything from a randomly select an image, or return a URL or IMG tag source specifically for that post.
The post option works through this logic until it gets a result
<ol>
<li>Returns an IMG tag based on the thumbnail set in the post meta data (through special post fields) </li>
<li>The first image in the post</li>
<li>A randomly chosen image from a directory (in your base images directory) with the same name as the posts first category slug.</li>
<li>A randomly chosen image from your base images directory</li>
</ol>
<h3>Functions available</h3>
There are 5 funtions that can be accessed through this plugin.
1. tui_findRandomBackgroundSTYLE()
<pre><code>Returns a random image URL from the background images folder if one exists else the base image folder.
</code></pre>
2, tui_findRandomThumbURL()
<pre><code>Returns a random image URL from base image folder
</code></pre>
3. tui_findRandomThumbIMG(“Height”,”Width”,”Class”,”Title”,”Alt”)
<pre><code>Returns a random image IMG Tage from base image folder
</code></pre>
4. tui_findPostThumbURL(“thepostID”)
<pre><code>Returns a URL, having searched based on the postID
</code></pre>
5. tui_findPostThumbIMG(“thepostID”,”Height”,”Width”,”Class”,”Title”,”Alt”)
<pre><code>Returns an IMG tag, containing the URL, height, width, alt, title and class, having searched based on the postID<h3>Support</h3>
</code></pre>
Support can be found on plugin homepage: http://www.stephenbaugh.com/blog/wordpress-plugins/find-thumb/
You can also view project here: http://code.google.com/p/tui-find-thumb/
<ul>
<li>
Additional documentation: http://code.google.com/p/tui-find-thumb/w/list
</li>
<li>
Issues & requests: http://code.google.com/p/tui-find-thumb/issues/list
</li>
<li>
Development version: http://code.google.com/p/tui-find-thumb/source/
</li>
<li>
Change logs: http://code.google.com/p/tui-find-thumb/wiki/Changelogs
</li>
</ul>

Tui’s Find Thumb

This plugin has been written to provide various ways to return an image thumb either as a URL or IMG tag. There are four functions.

This plugin creates a small photo album in the sidebar of your weblog and shows thumbnails of your photos using visual effects (javascript). The unique feature is a special shuffle mode and/or loop mode, that ensures that the order of pictures in the photo album is different from page to page, but remains the same for a given page (even if this page is reloaded).
Furthermore the order and picture selection changes for each page every day, so that over the time all photos from your collection will be displayed. As a bonus, there will be daily updates on pages that do show this sidebar widget. Your photo collection and the number of photos in the album is configurable in the admin section. Some OpenContent photos are included in the album and can be used for your experiments. Have a lot of fun …

Dynamic-Photo-Album

This plugin creates a small photo album in the sidebar of your weblog and shows thumbnails of your photos using visual effects (javascript).

Tui’s Find Thumb vs Dynamic-Photo-Album