Nelio External Featured Image (discontinued) - Available in Nelio Content

Nelio Content is a plugin aimed at helping blog owners run their blog. It's goal is to assist your work with the blog and, therefore, it features an editorial calendar, support for sharing content on social media, and so on. Nelio External Featured Images was designed with the solely purpose of setting external featured images in your posts. Whilst this plugin served its purpose quite well, there were several scenarios in which it simply didn't work. We believe external featured images are very helpful to all users. Therefore, we decided to integrate this plugin's functionality into Nelio Content. However, we didn't simply "duplicate" the code from one plugin to the other; we reimplemented the functionality from scratch and made it compatible with more themes.

No, you don't need to install Nelio Content to keep using the plugin. However, Nelio External Featured Images is now discontinued, and we strongly recommend you to replace it with Nelio Content. We've implemented several improvements in Nelio Content and made it compatible with multiple themes, including Newspaper, Newsmag, and Enfold.

As already stated in the plugin's description, Nelio External Featured Image is now discontinued. However, all its functionality is available in Nelio Content, so you can use Nelio Content to get our support and updates.

Every time an image is uploaded in the media library, WordPress automatically creates alternative versions of that image, each with a different size (thumbnail, medium, large and full). Themes may then choose among these different versions when displaying the an image in a post. Thumbnails do also exist for featured images, and themes may registerd their own alternative image sizes. For example, WordPress' default theme TwentyFourteen defines a thumbnail size called "twentyfourteen-full-width" whose dimensions are 1038x576. This plugin uses the alternative-size information (which your theme uses for rendering a featured image) for scaling and cropping external featured images via CSS on your users' browsers. There are some situations, however, in which this "size" information is not provided. In these scenarios, our plugin relies on theme's CSS file. If the CSS rules define the width and height of the featured image, everything should be fine. Otherwise, you may have to tweak something.

Try adding the following CSS code in your theme: img.nelioefi { min-width:100px; min-height:100px; } and refresh your site. If you can see the external featured image, it means that our plugin works properly, but some CSS tweaking was needed. Now, simply edit the CSS styles of your theme so that the featured image looks good everywhere (width, height, max-width, max-height).

WordPress offers more than one function for inserting featured images. Unfortunately, only one of them has a filter we can use. If your theme is not using the (get_)the_post_thumbnail, then our plugin will not be able to insert external featured images. In these cases, the only solution is to tweak your theme and edit some PHP code. Unfortunately, there's no generic solution for doing it. Just locate where featured images are being inserted, and edit those lines so that it uses the previous function (if possible). Please note that the plugin also offers some helper functions that will ease the "tuning" of the theme (check the file includes/nelio-efi-main.php to know them and review their documentation).

If you don't specify any featured image, the plugin will use the first image included in your post. In order to find the image, it looks for img tags that looks like the following: <img src="image-url-here" ... /> The img tag and the src attribute have to be "together". Otherwise, our plugin won't be able to find the featured image.

That's quite easy. Simply add the following line in your theme's functions.php file: add_filter( 'nelioefi_use_first_image', '__return_false' );