Featured Images Widget

Featured Images automatically features a thumbnail (or thumbnails) from your latest posts on your sidebar.

Current Version: 1.3 (January 22, 2008)

Download: Download Featured Images Here

Wordpress Compatibility: Tested on 2.3.1, won’t work on less than 2.3 

History:
After creating the Featured Video plugin, I was looking at the front page of this blog, and thought it would be really great to be able to feature thumbnails of my latest themes in the sidebar, instead of just on the home page. So, I took the idea behind the Featured Video plugin, and made it work with thumbnail images.

Installation Instructions:
Upload the featuredimages.php file to your /wp-content/plugins folder, then log into your admin account, and go to the Plugins page and click “Activate” in the Featured Images row

Usage:
This plugin is completely widgetized - there is no options page for it, all the customization can be done from the widget control menus.

Featured Images also allows you to add up to 9 different instances to your sidebar(s) - this lets you highlight different categories in different places, like I’ve done on this blog (with the Free and Premium theme sections on the sidebar)

Nuts and Bolts:
The plugin searches through the categories you select in the widget control menu, and looks for any post meta data called “Thumbnail” - so, when you’re writing a post (or editing it) scroll down the page to the “Custom Fields” section (you might have to expand it by clicking on the + sign) and add your thumbnail like this:

Key: Thumbnail

Value: http://www.theurl.com/to/your/image.gif

Where http://www.theurl.com/to/your/image.gif is the url of your image, and make sure you type “Thumbnail” into the Key field (no ” signs) or the plugin won’t find it.

Happy blogging!

Known Bugs:
When you delete the latest post in one of the categories you have Featured Images set up to use, the plugin knows about it, but fires its’ update code before the post delete actually happens. Workaround: Simply go to the Widgets page and click “Save Changes” to force the plugin to update the thumbnails.