WordPress 2.9 Video Tour

WordPress 2.9 delivers a handful of new features that cater specifically to those who demand total creative control over image handling.  If you are a photographer, videographer, artist or serious online publisher, you need to familiarize yourself with these new features, which include easy selection of post thumbnails, the ability to crop and rotate images, include & exclude images from galleries, and dead simple video embedding.  Below is an overview of these four new features, including video tutorials and useful links for further reading.

The Post Thumbnail

There is now a unified way of handling post thumbnails in WordPress.  Hallelujah!  Over the last few years, I’ve tinkered with dozens of different ways of handling post thumbnails to create “magazine” and “portfolio” themes.  From custom fields to custom scripts, all of these techniques proved to be either inflexible or unintuitive in my opinion.  Despite a few shortcomings, the new post thumbnail function is a much needed feature that simplifies the process of choosing which image becomes your post thumbnail.

Important note:  This feature must be enabled on your theme to work.  Below is a list of our themes that support this new feature. You can download these themes from your member page.  We plan to update the remaining themes, including the Monochrome series, later this week.

If you have switched themes recently or uploaded images with incorrect dimensions, you will likely need to “regenerate” your thumbnails to the new dimensions. To do this, you need the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin.

Video: How to use the post thumbnail feature

http://vimeo.com/8462281

Further reading:

Crop, Rotate, Flip

About 90% of the time, automated image crops generated by computer scripts deliver surprisingly acceptable results.  But if you have ever had a beautiful portrait becomes an odd neck-to-torso photo, you certainly know the limitations of automated image cropping.  This all changes in WordPress 2.9 with the new cropping, rotating and flipping tools.

Video: How to use the crop tool in WordPress 2.9

http://vimeo.com/8462348

Include & Exclude images from galleries

Until now, every image that you uploaded into a WordPress post would be thrown into the gallery.  To remove the image from the gallery, you had to delete the photo.  With WordPress 2.9, you can now choose images to include or exclude from each post gallery.  Please note that include and exclude cannot be used together.

Video: How to include & exclude images in WordPress 2.9 galleries

http://vimeo.com/8465648

Further reading:

Gallery Shortcode – via WordPress Codex

Video Embedding

Embedding video and images from third party sites like YouTube, Flickr or Vimeo into a WordPress post can be a pain.  Unless you use custom fields or another similar approach, more times than not, you video code would become a big garbled up mess in the write post panel.  WordPress 2.9 now uses the new oEmbed API to simplify video embedding.  Now, you can merely paste the link to the YouTube or Vimeo video into the post, and WordPress will generate the embed code for the video on the fly.  I am using it on this post to embed all of the Vimeo videos.  Pretty neat, eh?

Video: How to Add Videos to WordPress 2.9

http://vimeo.com/8462405

Suggestions for core WordPress developers

Here are a few suggestions that I hope core WordPress contributors consider for an upcoming WordPress release:

  • Integrate image editing with the Piknic API.
  • Add include/exclude photo gallery checkboxes.  Memorizing attachment ID’s gets old.
  • More buttons, fewer text links in the Add Media user interface.
  • Dynamically generated post thumbnails.
  • Ability to use oEmbed in custom fields for improved data/content-type separation.

What improvements would you like to see in future versions of WordPress in terms of image handling?

39 responses to “WordPress 2.9 Video Tour”

  1. Allan Punton Avatar
    Allan Punton

    Excellent briefing and videos on these 2.9 features.

  2. Allan Punton Avatar
    Allan Punton

    Excellent briefing and videos on these 2.9 features.

  3. Kristin Avatar

    hi – i am working on a blog that i intend to embed video from youtube frequently. i followed this tutorial and it worked great. but is there anyway to have the videos show on the homepage? sorry if there is an obvious answer – i am a newbie!

    1. Thad Avatar

      Hi Kristin

      It really depends on what theme you are using. Some themes don’t show the post “content” but rather, only show the post “excerpt”. You could look into changing all iterations of:

      <?php the_excerpt(); ?>

      with

      <?php the_content(); ?>

      But in the end, that might not lead to the best design.

  4. Kristin Avatar

    hi – i am working on a blog that i intend to embed video from youtube frequently. i followed this tutorial and it worked great. but is there anyway to have the videos show on the homepage? sorry if there is an obvious answer – i am a newbie!

    1. Thad Avatar

      Hi Kristin

      It really depends on what theme you are using. Some themes don’t show the post “content” but rather, only show the post “excerpt”. You could look into changing all iterations of:

      <?php the_excerpt(); ?>

      with

      <?php the_content(); ?>

      But in the end, that might not lead to the best design.

  5. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    Hey guys,

    Is there any way to add more than 5 images in the modularity slideshow theme?

    Thanks!

  6. Sam Avatar
    Sam

    Hey guys,

    Is there any way to add more than 5 images in the modularity slideshow theme?

    Thanks!

  7. Sergejs Avatar

    Hi guys! Thanks for brilliant Work-a-holic theme!

    However I find it weird that comments are not correctly handled in the theme. I use a fresh installation of WordPress 2.9.1 and Work-a-holic 2.0. In the Blog section I clearly see, that a post has comments, but the comment link opens up just a post with no comments and no comment form (aka ‘Leave a Reply’)!

  8. Sergejs Avatar

    Hi guys! Thanks for brilliant Work-a-holic theme!

    However I find it weird that comments are not correctly handled in the theme. I use a fresh installation of WordPress 2.9.1 and Work-a-holic 2.0. In the Blog section I clearly see, that a post has comments, but the comment link opens up just a post with no comments and no comment form (aka ‘Leave a Reply’)!

  9. jermaine Avatar

    Very nice video tutorial on WordPress, thanks a lot!

  10. jermaine Avatar

    Very nice video tutorial on WordPress, thanks a lot!

  11. Tek Düzen Muhasebe Avatar

    wordpress 2,9 wonderful..

    WordPress 2.9 Video Tour for share thanks

  12. Tek Düzen Muhasebe Avatar

    wordpress 2,9 wonderful..

    WordPress 2.9 Video Tour for share thanks

  13. Mike Avatar
    Mike

    Dear Thad,

    Is it possible to use either Shadowbox or Lightbox or any any other similar plugin on for example the theme Fullscreen?
    My friend told me he had tried but it didnt work with your themes? Is that true?

    Warmest regards

    1. Thad Avatar

      Hi Mike

      It sure is. Shadowbox can be tricky to work with, because you have to run it in stand alone mode. We prefer Fancybox, and it works right outta the box with our themes.

      Hope that helps,

      Thad

      1. Jon Blake Avatar

        Hello, will it be possible to use Fancybox or similar to launch VIMEO videos directly from the HOMEPAGE without going to the posts? Many thanks. RJ

  14. Mike Avatar
    Mike

    Dear Thad,

    Is it possible to use either Shadowbox or Lightbox or any any other similar plugin on for example the theme Fullscreen?
    My friend told me he had tried but it didnt work with your themes? Is that true?

    Warmest regards

    1. Thad Avatar

      Hi Mike

      It sure is. Shadowbox can be tricky to work with, because you have to run it in stand alone mode. We prefer Fancybox, and it works right outta the box with our themes.

      Hope that helps,

      Thad

  15. Chris Tomalty Avatar

    So I’ve been using Modularity Lite – a pre-2.9 version – , and I was wondering how to consistently get post thumbnails. If you look at my site, http://www.modelun.ca, there are post thumbnails on all the old ones (where I manually added pictures after I realized that the thumbnails occured) but on the three most recent it just won’t give a thumbnail. This is really bugging me.

    Is there any way to upgrade the theme without losing my customizations, or is there a way to make Modularity just do what it was doing before?

  16. Chris Tomalty Avatar

    So I’ve been using Modularity Lite – a pre-2.9 version – , and I was wondering how to consistently get post thumbnails. If you look at my site, http://www.modelun.ca, there are post thumbnails on all the old ones (where I manually added pictures after I realized that the thumbnails occured) but on the three most recent it just won’t give a thumbnail. This is really bugging me.

    Is there any way to upgrade the theme without losing my customizations, or is there a way to make Modularity just do what it was doing before?

  17. SYS Avatar
    SYS

    Hi Thad,

    I’m working with F8 Static.

    What I’m trying to do is…

    When you click thumbnail at Home, lightbox will display a post so that you don’t have to leave Home to read a post and I want the text part of each post to be displayed within the lightbox. I installed the Fancybox plug-in to see if it works but lightbox itself didn’t even work never mind including texts in it. Perhaps there’s some code I need to change…

    Could you help me on this?

  18. SYS Avatar
    SYS

    Hi Thad,

    I’m working with F8 Static.

    What I’m trying to do is…

    When you click thumbnail at Home, lightbox will display a post so that you don’t have to leave Home to read a post and I want the text part of each post to be displayed within the lightbox. I installed the Fancybox plug-in to see if it works but lightbox itself didn’t even work never mind including texts in it. Perhaps there’s some code I need to change…

    Could you help me on this?

  19. Christal Lafave Avatar

    I love youtube but yeah it does have some bad points. Like with copyright and things.

  20. Christal Lafave Avatar

    I love youtube but yeah it does have some bad points. Like with copyright and things.

  21. Renkli Dergi Avatar

    How about wordpress 3.1 there is no thumbnail post option. So Full screen theme is not functional in WP 3.1 version?

    Is tehere a solution, or just need to use wP 2.9 to solve it?

    Regards
    Seko

    1. Jeremy Ya Avatar
      Jeremy Ya

      Hi Seko,

      Did you ever figure out whether fullscreen works with WP 3.1?? I havent been able to get my homepage to generate thumbnails and its driving me crazy!

      Best,
      Jeremy

      1. Andrew Avatar
        Andrew

        Hey Seko & Jeremy,

        Did either of you figure this issue out? I am running WP 3.1. I can add images to the upper thumbs at 320×320 but when the posts get bumped into the lower thumbs 160×160 the images are stretched and pixilated despite being a smaller image?

        Andrew

        1. Gayatriom Avatar
          Gayatriom

          Hey! I’m getting this same issue. Any thoughts?1

  22. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    @Renkli – I was just working on this and it’s now called featured image instead of “Post Thumbnail” it’s called “Featured Image”

  23. Khmerrole Avatar
    Khmerrole

    video 2.9 it is good thank you

  24. Gutscheinsammler Avatar

    Whenever i klick “Use as thumbnail” it always adds the original image and not my cropped image! Can somebody help me?

  25. JR Avatar
    JR

    Is there a way to change the post order in Fullscreen? I tried Postmash Custom but can’t get it to work. Thanks.

  26. Nathan Avatar
    Nathan

    I am using Fullscreen and I never get the black X when I don’t add a featured image. Can anyone help?

  27. Gayatriom Avatar
    Gayatriom

    Hey … So question. Somehow the 320 X 320 thumbnails are showing up on in the bottom section also- anythoughts?

    http://gruvyruby.com

  28. Jon Blake Avatar

    Hello, will it be possible to use Fancybox or similar to launch VIMEO videos directly from the HOMEPAGE without going to the posts? Many thanks. RJ

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