I think that doing so with custom fields is the best way.
On my webpage I did a similar thing , but without custom fields, abd it is wrong (although it works fine)
See it here : http://www.krembo99.com
Over there I used the template files to produce that effect, and used the Excerpt for the thumbnail path, but like i said, custom fields are the way to do it.
I’m sure I’ve seen at least two plugins that help to automatically ‘retrieve’ an image from a post and display just the image elsewhere. The most recent one being Get Post Image (the site has over-used its bandwidth for the moment) and I think it does still work with the latest version of WordPress.
If you would like to use custom fields, and don’t want to keep adding a new key, perhaps you could look into More Fields as it adds a custom field in a more user-friendly manner.
More Fields is a **GREAT** plugin.
But here I do not see how it can help, he will still have to manualy add the thumb.
I am sure that WP has the first thumb stored in the DB and that is a way to retrieve it, but I just didn’t find it now, when I will have some free time I will do try to look it uop.
A simple query of the right table will do.
@krembo99: Thanks for your comment. When I was reading DarkArcher’s post, I wasn’t sure if he/she already had a generated thumbnail that just needed to be included with the post. If this was the case, then it would be much easier to use ‘More Fields’ than creating a custom field every time.
However, if the thumbnail is readily available in the database table as you’ve said, then I’d agree that a simple query would suffice as well (although at the moment I wouldn’t have a clue which table to use :D)
I did something similar using Post Thumbs Revisited. It will make any size thumbnail of your first image, and then you use their <?php the_thumb(); ?> tag in your archive/category/search template.
Worked for me. http://www.kylelmartin.com
@darkarcher – I have the same question. I am using the theme MiniBlogger – which required me to use the url of the thumbnail in the custom fields.
Is there anyway to automatically add the link to the thumbnail to the custom fields?
I found this plugin but I don’t understand how it is supposed to work.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpvn-thumbnailer/
