Request for FPW Category Thumbnails

First, I want to thank you so much for this plugin. This is one of the plugins that I install first on any WordPress installation, and one of the few that I am guaranteed to have on every installation. This plugin is fantastic.

However, I now ask for a rather sizable feature addition.

Plugins that pull the first image attached to a post to use as the post thumbnail usually fail when FPW Category Thumbnails is used. The reason being that those plugins will not pull an image if a thumbnail is already present, and when FPW Category Thumbnails is used for all categories, there is always a thumbnail already present.

I want this plugin to be able to support pulling the first image of a post for use as the post’s thumbnail, overriding FPW Category Thumbnails when needed.

The easier way to do this, which I don’t prefer, is to make this plugin support such other thumbnail plugins, so that those plugins disregard FPW Category Thumbnails’ already-chosen category thumbnail.

The harder way to do this, which I prefer, is to have FPW Category Thumbnails itself have the added functionality of pulling the first image of a post as a thumbnail, overriding its category thumbnail. This means that we would not rely on two thumbnail plugins, instead relying only on FPW Category Thumbnails.

As a wishful addition, although this is only a wish, I would like to see in the future, further functionality by having this plugin pull an thumbnail from a video for use as the post thumbnail, if a video is present. The video thumbnail function should have the option of overriding the image thumbnail if the admin so chooses. There is already a plugin that can do so well: “Video Thumbnails” by Sutherland Boswell.

If we were to go to extreme measures and make this the absolutely best and most perfect thumbnail plugin, we could make it so that if the thumbnails were from videos, clicking the thumbnail would make it expand into a lightbox that would play the video on the page where the thumbnail is found, without ever leaving the page where the list of posts and their thumbnails were found. This is wishful thinking, too, but this would be the thumbnail plugin that would rock WordPress up and down, and few people who use plugins wouldn’t use it.

I really want to see the latter happen, but… Maybe we’ll just do what we can. Or maybe not. Regardless, I really appreciate this plugin. Thanks so much for it. I find it indispensable. I’d give you some money if I had any at all. xD

Best of wishes to you and your plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fpw-category-thumbnails/