UPDATED: Version 2.8 released 11/14/05. Download now!
NOTE: Please note that this plugin doesn’t support Wordpress 2.3. However, you can find a wonderful remake here that does.
Yay! After a lot of work, the new version of the Image Headline Plugin is available. This plugin was originally written by Joel Bennett but it’s come a long way since the beginning. New features in this version include:
- Excellent integration into the WordPress 1.5 Strayhorn administration interface.
- Gorgeous anti-aliased, soft shadows.
- Easier than ever to configure.
So, if you’re ready to take a gander, go on and tell me what you think. If you do end up using the plugin, please leave me a comment here with a link to your site so I can see the results! I’d love to see what you guys come up with.
Ensellitis Says:February 18th, 2005 at 11:37 pm
This is great! It makes editing so much easier than with the old plugin. Now you need to make a plugin for your live preview, I have been trying to make one like yours, with the name and all, but haven’t figured it out… =)
MtDewVirus Says:February 18th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
I can’t get the plugin to find the fonts. I’ve created the folder, changed permissions, uploaded a TTF font. Still no luck. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. Any ideas?
ColdForged Says:February 18th, 2005 at 11:42 pm
Did you try the standard bundled font and it didn’t work either? Where did you create the folder?
MtDewVirus Says:February 18th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
Nevermind…finally got it. No clue what it was though.
ColdForged Says:February 18th, 2005 at 11:43 pm
Gah! I was supposed to write up more on how that was done and I haven’t gotten around to it. Thanks for the reminder, I’ll get something written up soon. Most of it is in fact a plugin, there’s just a little bit extra that must be done.
Ensellitis Says:February 18th, 2005 at 11:59 pm
Yeah, I tried doing it myself, like I said, and ended up using ALOT of else statements, and the preview couldn’t keep up and it slowed the whole the forms down.
And just one more quick question, what is the template tag for comment numbers? I see you have them counting the comments in each post, but everytime I try to do that, I only get the comments ID number… =\
ColdForged Says:February 19th, 2005 at 12:02 am
:) It isn’t. Basically it’s a simple PHP counter variable that’s manually incremented for each comment in the loop and echoed at the appropriate time.
Ensellitis Says:February 19th, 2005 at 12:19 am
You are to good. =P
MtDewVirus Says:February 19th, 2005 at 2:01 am
I had it working on a test site. Was working great. Moved it all over to my live install and now none of the png files will display. They are being created on the server (verified with FTP) and the img tags are being put in the HTML. Doesn’t make sense to me…any ideas? The test image doesn’t show in the admin either, but no errors.
ColdForged Says:February 19th, 2005 at 9:30 am
I see the image tags and if I try to copy the path to the image and just load that URL I get a 404 error. Double check that your cacheurl points at where your cachefolder exists.
MtDewVirus Says:February 19th, 2005 at 9:51 am
Wow….I had an extra “s” and it was “images-headlines”. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at that! Sometimes a simple reminder does the trick. Thanks! Great plugin!
Chad Says:February 19th, 2005 at 11:52 am
Hey, your Tarball download is 404…
ColdForged Says:February 19th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
Back in place, thanks Chad.
Alessandro Says:February 19th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
Absolutely wonderful. I’m using it right now.
BTW, this trackback thing in my WP installation must be horribly broken…
Chad Says:February 19th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
No problem. I actually found the 2.1 zip file. I’m persistent! However, transparent backgrounds don’t seem to be happening. Not that I’m complaining, because the effects are gorgeous so far! You can see the effect on my page at http://www.pirate-king.com. Although I’ll d/l the tar to see if there is any difference!
sean Says:February 19th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Really nice plugin, just installed it on my site:
http://sean.journeypix.com
Just one thing, I feel that the gap between the headline and the text is a bit large now, is it possible to do something with that?
ColdForged Says:February 19th, 2005 at 9:40 pm
The margin around the text is already managed pretty tightly. I downloaded one of your generated images — My Name Lon - You Like Me — and there’s only two pixels you could argue that could be cropped.
Your space between title and text results from two main things: your post-content selector has a 1em top pad which separates the main text from the title image, then you have a 5 pixel pad on all images which further separates it. By reducing your 1em pad on the post-content and defining a “.post-info img { padding: 0; }” style to handle your image titles I think you’ll have the spacing you want.
miss p. Says:February 20th, 2005 at 2:27 am
Stunning! I adore the proper shadows, too.
My only whinge is that when I was trying it on an off-white background (#eed), it didn’t quite match the background it was sitting on, but I suspect Safari is to blame for that.
I do wish IE were more reliable.
Apparently support for transparency finally happened a couple of weeks ago?
Ensellitis Says:February 20th, 2005 at 2:37 am
Miss P., Also try tweaking the shadow settings just right… Even the most littlest of color changes to the shadows color(s) can drastically change the way it looks on other backgrounds.
miss p. Says:February 20th, 2005 at 2:57 am
I didn’t use the shadows at all, unfortunately. Thanks for the tip, though.
With more poking and prodding I really do think it’s just Safari being dicky. The text also looks noticeably darker than identically-coloured plain text right next to it. In Firefox, however, it’s just fine.
Alessandro Says:February 20th, 2005 at 5:27 am
I only have one little complaint, regarding the (otherwise wonderful) admin interface:
My concern is that if others follow the way you’re leading, the WP admin-interface will soon become too cluttered with custom extension and additions, spread all over the place and mixed with the “regular” interface.
SO, why don’t you move your plugin config panel under …well, the “plugin” section? I think this way is also easier to find each plugin options.
Otherwise, WP could provide an automated way to highlight every plugins addition (e.g. with different text color) and give feedback about where it’s coming from (a lil’description, and so on….)
I hope I made myself clear.
ColdForged Says:February 20th, 2005 at 11:07 am
I don’t know, Chad, it looks damned nice in Firefox for me. In my current version of IE it isn’t transparent, but I expected that.
Thanks!
Yeah, supposedly IE can actually display a transparent PNG file these days. Miracles happen. Sorry about the background diddling in Safari… I don’t know what to say about it, really.
I see where you’re coming from, Alessandro. Unfortunately there are no hooks in WordPress to allow installation of submenus under the Plugins menu. I’ll keep looking for better ways of integrating. Thanks for the suggestion.
Ensellitis Says:February 20th, 2005 at 12:16 pm
Perhaps another good way to do it would be in the next WP version to actually have an area for plugin setting in the plugin area, kind of like how presentations is set up, having a list of plugins that have an admin interface and have the link for the options be there?
David Ascher Says:February 20th, 2005 at 8:48 pm
Very nice, thanks. Ooh, that’s a very nice auto-preview comment form. I need to find that…
Photo Matt » Image Headline Plugin Says:February 20th, 2005 at 9:19 pm
[…] Image Headline Plugin
Bleu Unicorn Says:February 21st, 2005 at 12:12 am
Very nice! I just finished installing this at my website and it looks lovely.
I do have what may be a stupid and obvious question…but is it possible to generate these headlines on nonposts - like static pages that aren’t using the_title? And if so, how would I call the plugin to do it’s job.
Also, I love your comment preview!
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 12:28 am
Not a stupid question at all and yes, you can easily do what you want. Simply make the following call where you want the image:
(Note: don’t put the backslashes… my code display hates me) If you have static text — meaning not in a variable — you can just do it like so:
Thanks for the kind words everyone.
Chad Says:February 21st, 2005 at 12:49 am
<smack> yeah, I completely forgot about the IE transparent problems with PNG.
But it doesn’t matter, because I still love it, and it’s a gorgeous effect. This is definitely one of my favorite plugins of all time now.
Thanks!
Scott Says:February 21st, 2005 at 1:19 am
Looks like a sweet plugin. However, I’m having trouble getting it to work. I can’t find the “the_title();” text anywhere. I’m using the 1.5 release. I’ve searched in the classic and default themes…I’m probably just doing something stupid.
Thanks for the help.
Scott Says:February 21st, 2005 at 1:45 am
Anyway, I found where the “the_title();” text was hidden but now have the problem that when I click on “Headlines” under Options, nothing happens. Also, when I go to the post page the headline works fine but then I am unable to go back to the main page.
Kyle Says:February 21st, 2005 at 1:55 am
Anybody get non-titles to work, as described in comment #27? If so, could you post the code snippet? The call doesn’t seem to return anything. Thanks.
Chris Says:February 21st, 2005 at 3:04 am
First off, thanks for the plugin. I appreciate the time and effort that you’ve put into it. It’s a great idea to liven up the page.
I’ve having a little trouble with it, however. I have successfully installed it, but my images aren’t showing correctly. With the default color settings still in place, the images aren’t showing as described - red letters with a soft gray background shadow. Here’s an example of what it’s showing as instead:
http://www.digitalwilderness.net/wordpress/wp-content/image-headlines/361b6722ae6ffa1ede5a14c93a8af880.png
And this is without changing anything from the default, other than the “Image cache URL”
I’ve tried changing the colors, but the image usually shows as all white or all black…
I’ve made sure the appropriate directory is writable and checked to make sure images are being created as I’ve changed the options.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
a1ehouse Says:February 21st, 2005 at 3:57 am
Great plugin, however I’m getting a bug from somewhere. My pages load fine, and the png’s are generated/shown, however when I mouse over the image when using IE (only at work for me - ff at home) I get a page error:
Line: 98
Char: 5
Error: ‘nicetitle.length’ is null or not an object
Code: 0
Any one of a fix?
Jim Says:February 21st, 2005 at 4:49 am
FYI, a small conflict with the ‘view levels’ plugin which displays the image of a lock on post-titles with the viewlevel attribute on them. The image generated is for the text c=’/wp-images/padlock.gif’ border=’0′/><sup>1</sup>-image-… where ‘…’ is the post title. That’s followed by actual text of everything from ‘-image-’ onward, inclusive. It’s probably the viewlevels plugin that needs to be fixed but the published contact info for the author of it doesn’t seem to work any more.
hipocratico Says:February 21st, 2005 at 9:27 am
Hi…newbie question…I don´t see any preview…on my admin panel…what is wrong…thanks
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 9:30 am
What other plugins do you have installed? The only thing that I can think of is that someone is redefining the “ispluginpage()” function… I’ve seen at least one do that.
When you say your are unable to go back to the main page, what does that mean? It sounds like a navigation problem the way you state it which this plugin shouldn’t affect in the slightest. However, if you mean that the headlines work on the single-post page but not on the main page, you need to modify the “the_title()” call in all of the template files that you want the images displayed.
Note that in order to be able to do this you either need to call it from the template or use a plugin like RunPHP so that you can execute PHP code in your post or static page content.
Congratulations! You get “Funky Behavior Of The Day” award. (Note that I couldn’t load the file with the URL given, but this one worked just fine. To be honest, Chris, I haven’t a friggin’ clue what’s going on with that. What kind of host are you on? Any specific details of the hosting environment might help figure out what’s going on here.
Looks like a problem with your NiceTitles javascript implementation not handling things correctly. Do you have an URL where I can view this behavior?
I’ll see what I can do.
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 9:31 am
Double-check your cache url and cache folder settings and make certain that they both point to the same place in your installation.
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 9:37 am
Actually, I can’t even find a place to download the plugin, so it may be difficult to find a solution
. Can I email you at the address you gave so you can email me back the plugin?
abhi Says:February 21st, 2005 at 11:03 am
i am using it on my site and it simply works great with the default font. however, when i tried to use roxanne, it showed some weird characters. i downloaded the font for windows PC. what do you think could be the problem?!
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 11:10 am
Upon loading that font — found here for those curious — it seems that the font only contains capital letters. Therefore, any lower-case letters in your title will be displayed incorrectly.
Adam Says:February 21st, 2005 at 11:27 am
I tried to get non-post images to work, but didn’t have any luck either. I tried it in the template (index) and in other pages (that are also php). No luck. It works great on the_title, but nothing else.
If anybody has it working, I’d also love to know how.
hipocratico Says:February 21st, 2005 at 11:55 am
thanks doublecheckign the cache path solved the “previe” problem. Now (another newbie question), how can I get this image headline on each and everyone of my posts?
Thanks for your time and help
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 12:01 pm
If you mean on the individual entry pages, you’ll need to do the same change you made on your Main Template to the other templates (ie. the archives template, the single template, the page template, etc).
Let me double-check the method.
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 1:11 pm
Sorry Adam, works as I described in comment #27. Remember not to include the backslashes.
Scott Says:February 21st, 2005 at 1:20 pm
Thanks for the reply Coldforged. I’ve now included the ‘-image-’ text in the post page…and it works on the post page. However, the main site does not work any longer. http://www.illiteratewithdrawal.com does not load when ‘-image-’ is included (remove it and the main page works). However, a direct link to a specific post does work: http://www.illiteratewithdrawal.com/2005/02/spam-karma/.
In regards to the Options not available for the plugin, I have these plugins activated: Header Image Generator, Spam Karma, and WP Plugin Manager.
Thanks for the help.
Adam Says:February 21st, 2005 at 1:23 pm
Hmm…I know this is going to seem like beating me over the head, but you can post your sample code with the full php call? I must be doing something wrong. Thanks.
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 1:30 pm
Scott, could you disable Spam Karma temporarily and try again please?
Adam, that code you see in comment 27:
(minus the DAMNED backslashes) is the full PHP call. You can see it in action here, verbatim. Note that that is using the aforementioned RunPHP plugin.
Adam Says:February 21st, 2005 at 2:05 pm
I didn’t use echo. Could be the problem?
Scott Says:February 21st, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Spam Karma is now disabled and the same problem occurs.
Chris Says:February 21st, 2005 at 2:21 pm
Thanks for replying, CF. It’s nice to get an award, even if it’s the “Funky Behavior Of The Day” award.
I’m on pair.com. Here’s some environment info:
OS: FreeBSD
Server Software: Apache/1.3.29
PHP Version: 4.3.10
MySQL Version: 4.0.16
Any other info that would help?
Sorry about messing up that link, but you got it. Here is it again:
Link
Jim Says:February 21st, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Yes, you can. Better yet, you can get it here: h*tp://jimbala.net/vl.txt .
Also perhaps of relevance if you install the thing: The instructions say to modify wp-blog-header.php but that doesn’t seem to be necessary with wp1.5 — there’s no call to filter_posts() any more. I actually didn’t do anything for this plugin after upgrading and it seems to work as expected.
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 3:24 pm
Thanks, Jim. Could you try one thing and see how it affects the works? Edit the vl.php file (or whatever it’s called) and find the following lines:
And change them to read:
Jim Says:February 21st, 2005 at 3:41 pm
That seems to have fixed it. The 13 is an offset or something?
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 3:44 pm
Excellent! That parameter is the priority that controls when the plugins will run. Essentially you have told the “view levels” plugin to run after the Image Headlines plugin.
Jim Says:February 21st, 2005 at 4:02 pm
Ah, most cool. Thanks for the fix.
For anyone that cares about using the viewlevel plugin, and because I already said no other changes were necessary but have since discovered that to be false: in 1.5 you DO have to change one file; it’s just wp-feed.php instead of wp-blog-header.php, and the change is meant to prevent vl’d post content from showing up in your RSS feeds. Anyway, on line 5 of wp-feed.php, right after ‘$doingrss = 1;’, add ‘filterposts($doing_rss);’ (without the apostrophes), then look at your RSS content and comment feeds to see if ‘Sorry, you must be logged in’ is anywhere to be found — it should NOT be — and obviously check for content that shouldn’t be there. Sorry for co-opting the thread a little bit, CF, but I didn’t want to let stand incorrect info that could cause someone’s private posts to be leaked.
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 4:06 pm
No worries, this is as good a place as any since the view level plugin seems to have been orphaned. Thanks for clearing it up for others.
Bleu Unicorn Says:February 21st, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Just wanted to thank you again, I got the headlines working just fine on the non-posts just as easily as I installed the plugin. Thanks again!
Dean Says:February 21st, 2005 at 4:34 pm
I’m having a problem when I go to the Options/Headlines page, I get a message that my version of PHP doesn’t support ImageCreateTrueColor(). I run my own Win2k server with PHP 5.0.3. According to php.org, this function IS supported. Any idea how I can get this to work?
Thanks!
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 4:42 pm
You may simply not have the GD library enabled (it’s disabled by default in Windows installations). Check to see if the following line is in your php.ini file. If not, put it in and restart the PHP extension.
extension=php_gd2.dll
Mike Says:February 21st, 2005 at 5:53 pm
Working great for me!
Dean Says:February 21st, 2005 at 6:07 pm
Thanks ! Enabling php_gd2.dll was the needed fix. Works great now!
Dean Says:February 21st, 2005 at 6:25 pm
Functionally, this is working great. However, under Options/Headlines, I have noticed that whenever I click the Update Options button, the Image Cache Folder entry accumulates more backslashes. It appears to be doubling the number of backslashes between each directory name in my path entry. The entries that use forward slashes don’t seem to be affected by this.
Dean Says:February 21st, 2005 at 6:32 pm
Functionally, the plugin is working, however, every time I click the Update Options button on the Headlines page, the entry for the Image Cache Folder doubles the number of backslashes between each directory name. Entries with forward slashes are not affected.
Kyle Says:February 21st, 2005 at 8:06 pm
I’m curious, if I want the images to display with all caps, could I add an “strtoupper” in the plugin code? Not sure where. Is there an easier way? I don’t want to change the actual titles.
ColdForged Says:February 21st, 2005 at 8:58 pm
Ah, Windows pathnames… something I didn’t take into account. I’ll make an update in the coming days. Until then, don’t do that
.
Absolutely! Look for the line that looks like this:
return ImageHeadline_imagine( $text );and change it like so:
return ImageHeadline_imagine( strtoupper( $text ) );
Paul - SteelerDirtFreak Says:February 21st, 2005 at 9:02 pm
I just installed this plugin; works great! Love it. Thanks!
w8in Says:February 21st, 2005 at 10:25 pm
Great plugin…really nice. Using it at Original Copy
hipocratico Says:February 21st, 2005 at 11:12 pm
working great with your advice…by the way nice place. And this comment place great too.
muchacho loco Says:February 22nd, 2005 at 12:09 am
I followed every step in order to get this plugin working, but it seems that:
a- I am a dork
b- Even I followed the steps every time I click on Options > Headlines I can’t see no Preview at all
c- The only way to get into the configuration page is by deleting the .ttf fonts of the directory, and if I upload the default ttf, once again I cannot see the preview in the headline configuraton page.
d- If I activat