There are plenty of posts floating around the internet about using Custom Fields to assign thumbnail images to individual posts in WordPress. Web Developer Plus has a different idea.
Do you often put images in your posts? You probably upload them through the media manager built right in to the WordPress post editor. Every time you upload an image, it’s associated with the post you first attach it to. And WordPress creates a thumbnail to go along with it, of the size specified in the media settings.
Web Developer Plus has a an article on how to automatically find the thumbnail URL of the first image attached to a post and store it in the variable $img, which you can then echo out into an <img /> tag wherever you want the thumbnail to appear.
<?php
//Get images attached to the post
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'attachment',
'post_mime_type' => 'image',
'numberposts' => -1,
'order' => 'ASC',
'post_status' => null,
'post_parent' => $post->ID
);
$attachments = get_posts($args);
if ($attachments) {
foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
$img = wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( $attachment->ID );
break;
}
}
?>
<img src="<?php echo $img; ?>" alt="Post Thumbnail" />
That’s a bit easier to handle, isn’t it? Once you have it set up, you don’t have to mess around with custom fields whenever you write a new post.
How To Use Thumbnails Generated By WordPress In Your Theme [Web Developer Plus]
