As I was writing my last post, there was a moment where I had to think about about what featured image I wanted to use. I didn’t really have one, so I just picked my profile picture. It worked, I guess, but I don’t think this is a sustainable approach. Ideally, I’d like to have a unique image for every post.
But this sounds like a lot of work, and I’m lazy. Perhaps WordPress can offer an assist?
I’m thinking of adding a feature to my theme to automatically generate a post image, save it to the Media library, and then append it to the post. I think all of the elements I need are already available:
- PHP can create image files, and upload them the WordPress upload location.
- The theme should be able to create an “attachment” post type with the image details.
- Then, upon successful upload, append the attachment ID to the post I’m authoring.
As far as the substance of the images themselves, I’m thinking it should be easy enough to retrieve a profile picture of the author, or the header image/colour from the theme, and put that into the image. The excerpt of the post can be used as a text overlay. Give it a nice trendy layout and, voila!
I’ll get to prototyping something when I can. Should be fun!