Archive for October, 2011

Show a number of posts ( or pages ) links and thumbnails images, randomly picked from a certain set.

For this we will need the set of ‘promoted’ posts ( or pages ), and a function to get the posts thumbnails.

For get the posts thumbnails function i will not insist and just use this one here. The set of ‘promoted’ posts will be a simple array of ID’s.

Add this to the functions.php file

function getPromotedLinks() {
	// the array with the ID's of the posts ( or pages ) to be shown as promoted
	$promoted = array( x, xx, xxx, ... n ); //here put your posts or pages ID's
	$rand_ids = array_rand( $promoted, 5 ); //replace '5' with an integer of how many promoted items to be shown at once

	//what will be showed in frontend
	echo '<ul class="promotedlinks">';
		foreach ( $rand_ids as $i ) {
			//get the post (or page) image
			$postID = $promoted[$i];
			$all_images =& get_children('post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&post_parent=' . $postID );

			if($all_images) {
				$arr_of_all_images = array_keys( $all_images );
				// Get the first image attachment from post
				$firstImage = $arr_of_all_images[0];
				// Get the thumbnail url for the attachment
				// If you want the full-size image instead of the thumbnail, use wp_get_attachment_url() instead of wp_get_attachment_thumb_url().
				$thumb_url = wp_get_attachment_thumb_url( $firstImage );
				// Build the <img> string
				$First_thumb_image = '<img src="' . $thumb_url . '" width="100" height="100" alt="Thumbnail Image" title="Thumbnail Image" />';
			}

			echo '<li><a href="'. get_permalink( $promoted[$i] ) .'">';
				echo $First_thumb_image;
			echo '<span>'. get_the_title( $promoted[$i] ) .'</span></a></li>';
		}
	echo '</ul>';
}

this is all, … you get a list of 5 (or how many you like), random links with thumbnails, which you can call anywhere ( inside loop, outside loop-> sidebar etc ), by <?php getPromotedLinks(); ?>.

Style as you wish,… an example would be:

ul.promotedlinks { margin: 0; list-style-type: none; }
ul.promotedlinks li { width: 125px; float: left; padding: 0; border-left: 1px solid #DDDDEE; overflow: hidden; }
ul.promotedlinks li:first-child { border-left: none; }
ul.promotedlinks li a { display: block; height: 100%; padding: 6px; }
ul.promotedlinks li a:hover { text-decoration: none; background: #DDDDEE; }
ul.promotedlinks li a img, ul.promotedlinks li a span { display: block; }

A neat feature for wordpress blogs or custom sites is to show the author biography and other information on the ‘author archive’ page.

For this we could use the ‘the_author_meta()‘ or get_the_author_meta functions to get the meta information we need, but if we want to show the author info outside the loop, so that even if the user hasn’t published any posts, it will still be visible. In order to do this we will get an object with all the info we need.

$userInfo = get_user_by('slug', get_query_var('author_name'));

and this holds all the info we need, and we will get it like this:

echo $userInfo->display_name
echo $userInfo->first_name
echo $userInfo->last_name
echo $userInfo->eme_phone
echo $userInfo->user_email
echo $userInfo->user_url
echo nl2br($userInfo->description)
//etc

the nl2br() php function is used to return the user description with <br /> which are striped out by wordpress.

And changing the first parameter of the get_user_by function, to one of the supported values $field = ‘id’, ‘slug’, ’email’, or ‘login’ , you can use this object in all places you need.