I am creating a course aggregation site for the current Tech Noir ds106 course, and it’s been a while. Thankfully Alan Levine and Tom Woodward have been kind enough to help me hack the old gold TwentyTwelve WordPress theme to get the mother blog to show excerpts (not native to the theme) and now maybe even include photos.
Chopper from Minority Report looks a lot like Slave-1
Turns out getting excerpts to work on the main blog page was pretty easy thanks to Alan, who figured out you just need to change the line in content.php of the TwentyTwelve theme from
<?php if ( is_search() ) :
to
<?php if ( is_search() or is_home() ) :
That worked brilliantly. Now in terms of getting the feed aggregator FeedWordPress to pull images, Tom created the plugin Noir Chopper that not only creates excerpted posts but also pull in image if there is one…so this post is a test.
Update: Tom’s plugin worked a treat! In order to get posts on the homepage to include the first image (category pages had them out-of-the-box) I had to include a clean version of content.php for that theme (or remove the change I made with Alan’s code suggestion above 🙂 ).
Tom is right. It was refreshing to bang on the WP stuff and shred ideas. Especially as we can find different solutions to the same goal.
One thing to remind students is that if they use a theme with featured images, they will need to also include the same image in their post, and indeed as the first image to work.
RSS feeds do not know of featured images, so without an image in the post, you’d see nothing when aggregated. There was once some plugin that would insert the WP featured image into the RSS feed, but no idea if its still around.
Look at this blog/comment network!
I think having them use images at all will be a first step 🙂 And fact is your solution worked brilliantly, but for the images the plugin was clean. I stepped over myself when I had modified the content.php file, if it was a clean file I would have not been bothering you and Tom on mastodon—but that also felt good in terms of this blog/comment network. why can’t we continue to share and rule, we are all still just dirty hippies.
Hippies and bloggers must use the side door.