Posts Thumbs for WordPress; The Smart & Easy way

Have you spent much time adding posts thumbnails using custom fields.. or -like me- spent much time trying many plugins that either not working well or very limited.

I was always not convinced with "Read more" built-in option in WordPress. As it is very unlikely to use the starting portion of your post as a teaser or summary.

Many people use custom fields for doing it which is somehow complicated. Especially if you are building a Wordpress Blog for a client; you would want to make it easy for him.

I've came across a very smart and easy plugin that will associate thumbnails to each post on your WordPress blog:
It is Custom Field Images

Here some of its features:

• The plugin will intelligently utilize WordPress built-in media library. and that comes with many advantages..
• You don't have to upload images again to attach thumbnail for each post.
• On media library window you have a button "Insert CFI" to instruct the plugin to attach the selected image to current post. plus the image title you already entered for that image. (Which is a very SEO thing to do!)
• My favorite feature is: Post Thumbnail is not saved by its URL instead by the Image ID , So in home page I can use the medium sized images and somewhere else -like Posts Reel- I can use the thumb sized images!
• Very simple installation is required to replace the code that output whole post content with the post excerpt. and you configure the plugin to insert the thumb in excerpt. That is it
• The plugin comes with a widget to display posts thumbs selected by any query you like (Recent 5 or Some Category Posts)
• Plugin can extract thumbnails from images already in your posts content.
  
• Still, If you have custom layout somewhere else. All you need is to place this line in the Loop
  <?php custom_field_image('', 'size=medium&align=left'); ?>
  Which will display medium sized images and left aligned!
  

More important than the plugin itself, is the developer Behind it. A dedicated developer that amazed me with his expertise and his fast response to bug reports or feature requests.

Go, get latest version from Plugin Homepage , Version 2.0 was just released last night!

Tags: SEO , Tech Tips , WordPress