12 Jul 2009, Posted by christie in Blogging Bytes, 24 Comments

Thesis theme: Images and thumbnails made simple

Finally got Thesis

I downloaded the Thesis theme yesterday afternoon and have been having a great time exploring it! I had wanted Thesis for quite a while, but when I’d read about the wonderful support forum and community I’d think gee, I really don’t have time to get into a big mess with code in a theme. I have a full time job, two full time kids, and an aging house, so I do well to just read interesting stuff and write blog posts once in a while. But it turns out that although the possibilities for customization are nearly unlimited, and I’m sure I’ll have fun trying lots of stuff in coming months, Thesis still looks pretty damn good right out of the box. And there are pages of options to select easily, from how many featured posts and “teasers” you want (my home page is all teasers) to whether you want to make certain links, like the Home link in the nav menu, No Follow. As soon as I clicked Activate then selected the options about my title, sidebars, etc., my site looked as good as it ever has. The images were perfect and the text wrapped great.

Used Thesis teasers to make a magazine style look

Since that much worked well, I decided to press on. I had wanted my blog to look sort of magazine style, so I read on HowToMakeMyBlog.com about making Thesis look very cool and magazine style. I followed Marko’s clear instruction and it was a piece of cake. However, I could not get it through my head how the automatic thumbnail generation was supposed to work. Almost all of my posts have images, and when I specified that all posts on the front page would be teasers, the teasers did not have thumbnails! But in Thesis Options I had filled in the Default Thumbnail Settings , and there really is no way to do that “incorrectly.”

Why did the thumbnails not work?

It turns out that if you upload and insert your image into the post through the regular old WordPress Add an Image, Thesis is not going to see that and generate a thumbnail. But if you upload the image and instead put a link in the the Post Image field to where the image is stored (must be on your domain), a thumbnail of the appropriate size will be automatically generated for you for the teaser. So I went back to the latest few of my posts and removed the image I had put in each one originally, then specified the url for each one in the Post Image field. That worked out great; thumbnails were automatically generated for each post. If you go to my home page, you will see that there are thumbnail pictures now on the latest few posts. I’m not going to redo all of the posts from the past few months but just wanted some visual interest on the recent posts anyway.

But – images put into THUMBNAIL Image box are not automatically resized

One last thing – I had decided that I want to go back to uploading/inserting pictures using WordPress Add an Image so that I could include a link back to the Flickr photographer’s photo stream, and I thought I’d just put a link to the same uploaded image in the Thumbnail Image field. Nope! If you put a URL directly into the Thumbnail Image field, Thesis assumes that it has already been resized and does not resize it. So my link I put in that field caused a very large “thumbnail” that was the original photo, of course.

So – from now on, if I’m using photos from Flickr with the Attribution license,  instead of having the image by clickable back to the photographer’s photo stream, I’m going to just have Photo Credit: followed by that link at the bottom of each post.  That way I can have my Post Image box hold the url for the image (as uploaded to my own miscbytes.com domain) also be where the thumbnail comes from, and the thumbnail will be automatically resized for me.  In other words, I am putting NOTHING into the Thumbnail Image field unless I wanted a different thumbnail from the main image.  And if I do put something in Thumbnail Image field, I will have to resize it to 66×66 myself.

I am very happy I got Thesis – you can have your site looking really good within a few minutes after you click Activate! Then there are untold numbers of amazing things you can do when you do have the time. Get Thesis and start enjoying this awesome theme!