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Network Theme Front Page blog post image info display: TimThumb

Hi,
Re: Network Theme SEO.

I chose the theme because the download size was small and I like the idea of featuring member blog posts. But the theme provides precious few ways to add text content to the home page, so I'm drilling down on the blog posts. I need bettter content displayed for the front/home page blog posts.

Currently it displays the image, link to the post and link to the site, but there are no controls over the link Title. I'm not sure why I should want both links.

My first thought was to include the Information from the Media Library image itself, such as the Title, Alternate Text, Caption and maybe display the Description. But the code does not pick up on this information.

I've been looking at Infinite SEO and Ultomate SEO to see if there are any media controls, but so far I have not found them.

Any suggestions?

Larry

  • Kimberly

    Larry,

    I am following you and not following you.... :slight_smile:

    If your blog is named My Veggie Garden and you write an article on Fertilizer and it shows up on the Network page as such. Say I'm browsing around for some advice on how to get my tomatoes to grow and come across your site, I would probably go straight to your site and hang around a bit vs. visiting the post and then leaving because your article didn't help me specifically. Just my take...anywhoo

    If you wanted to change anything about the display links you would have to look into the theme files and make the changes to display what information you are looking for there.

    Not everyone will want their pictures to be the subject of their links, so that's probably what the thought was here.

    Perhaps somebody else will have a suggestion?

    Best,

    Kimberoy

  • tishimself

    Hi,

    If your blog is named My Veggie Garden and you write an article on Fertilizer and it shows up on the Network page as such. Say I'm browsing around for some advice ...

    .
    The post will show up on the Network homepage as an image and two links. Unless I can tweak the title, alt and text content there is very little hope that your browsing will bring you to my home page based on just two links. (To be clear, I'm talking about my Network home page and not the site with the full content of the post.)

    If you wanted to change anything about the display links you would have to look into the theme files and make the changes to display what information you are looking for there.

    I am asking for help on how to make these changes to the content displayed. I also think this would be valuable information for most anyone using the theme.

    Not everyone will want their pictures to be the subject of their links, so that's probably what the thought was here.

    And like me, maybe some want to use the Network theme with images just like in the WPMUDEV demo site. I think this idea is useful & hope to get some help.

    I'm not sure what the value is in displaying two links. I think displaying the image caption or a content snippit with "more..." would be better.

    Regards,
    Larry

  • tishimself

    Hi,

    I set "Show Thumbnails In Blog Posts?" to "No" to see if I liked the results better, but it just shows the two links without and image. There is no additional content added, the image thumbnail is just gone.

    The related code seems to be in custom-functions.php in the function multisite_recent_posts.
    As of yet I have no idea how to reference the image attributes or the post content to be able to add them.

    Any suggestions?

    I suppose I could add static Alt and Titles for the time being.
    Regards,
    Larry

  • Kimberly

    Larry,

    My apologies. My only intention was to state that when the theme was designed it was designed for the maxiumum usage potential. Obviously we can't accout for every situation where folks might want something different.

    Anything beyond a bit of code or css help is typically considered custom work and beyond what we can provide here. At current the theme designer who created this theme is no longer with us and we are working to fill that spot.

    If you can explain to me what you would like to show where then I can perhaps try to help you customize this a bit :slight_smile: I understand what you want to show, the pic meta, but where would you like it? Are you wanting to replace the post title with that info? Or would you like to replace it with something else?

    Kimberly

  • tishimself

    NP and certainly no appolgies needed.

    I realize support of custom updates is limited, but I do think that raising SEO concerns like this about theme usage is important.

    My main issue is learning how to reference the Featured Image attributes(title, alt, caption, description). I think this is the best place to pull content, rather than from the post itself, but I'm not 100% certain.

    Goal: Add text content to the blog post listing on the Network theme Home Page.
    - Remove one of the two links to create more space for text content. I can do this.
    - Add ALT and Title info from the featured image to the remaining link.
    - Add the image description or caption to the text below the link.

    This is a work in progress for me, but I have determined that I can't add the first 10 words of the post content because often the first part of the post is another image which messes with the front page.

    I've been searching the web in an attempt to learn how to refernene WP media file attibutes.
    I need to test that I can add the Function Library folder to my child theme to update a customized copy of custom-functions.php.

    It seems that Infinite SEO and Ultimate SEO are unable to control the <img> alt and link Title attributes.
    Larry

  • tishimself

    Hi,

    http://www.my-woodcraft.com

    You can see the in-progress front page layout. There is room for a 400 char welcome text and some 95 chars of text for each front page post. Some 1100 chars of potential SEO content on the front page were none was there b4.

    FYI, click on the Facebook icon to see the Facebook fanpage and then the Welcome to view the WP app.

    The library folder is ignored in the child theme.

    Still can't pull up the image meta info.

    Larry

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