Featured Images Not Showing

[Rebecca Morency]

Hi Bill,

I just noticed when I updated Foxy that the opening slideshow continues to appear on pages where I had set a featured image.

The featured image was still on the pages, but I tried uploading another copy of the image and setting it as the featured image. No luck…still the slideshow.

I used Appearance/Theme Options/Styling to handle CSS changes so I don’t think any code was removed. In case I did, is there a piece of code I need to paste somewhere to make this work?

Other thoughts?

Also, for a caching plugin does W3 Total Cache work well with this theme?

Thanks,

Becky

[Bill Robbins]

Becky,

Great question. Have you tried setting the “format” to image? When I released version 1.4, we changed the background just a bit so you could use the gallery format to create a slideshow on any page/post using the images uploaded on that page/post. To make that happen though, I had to change the background image to use the image format and not just the featured image alone.

Try setting the featured image like you’ve already done and then choose the image format. If you have any trouble, let me know.

W3 Total Cache is great plugin. What I would suggest is experimenting with it and WP Super Cache and testing their speed with Pingdom Tools to see which works best with your server. My old web server worked best with W3, but my current one is much quicker with WP Super Cache.

Have a great week,
Bill

[Rebecca Morency]

Thanks, Bill.

That fixed it. I saw those and didn’t want to choose the wrong one. So on each page or post, you have the following options:
“Standard” is the home page slideshow.
“Image” lets you use the featured image.
“Gallery” lets you add a separate slideshow in a post or page.

I improved speed with W3 Total Cache and WP Smush.it. I’ll test WP Super Cache and see which works best with my server.

One of the suggestions for speed improvement was to CSS Sprite the social media icons at the top. Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Becky

[Bill Robbins]

Becky,

Sounds like you’ve got the formats down. When WordPress 3.6 ships in a few months, it will really update the interface for these formats and should make them much better to use. I’m pretty excited about that.

You can turn the social icons into a sprite, but you’ll need to change them from being loaded via an img tag in the HTML to being a background image in the CSS. If you’re using three/four or less, it’s probably not worth the trouble as the time savings would be pretty negligible.

If you change that, you might consider going with an icon font. Those work better with retina and high dpi displays and offer a bit more flexibility in what you can do with them. If I was to change them, that’s where I would go. Zurb has a nice icon font that you could make use of.

Just a thought.

Have a great week,
Bill

[Rebecca Morency]

I thought the load time savings would be neglible.

I was able to go from 71% to 94% according to gtmetrix.com and to faster than 91% on pingdom.

Thanks again for your help.

Becky

[Bill Robbins]

The savings a good caching plugin can make are impressive. Have fun and let me know if you need anything.

[Frank Voce]

When creating a gallery and then clicking on a single pic I got the following message:

You have to specify the size. Add ?lightbox[width]=600&lightbox[height]=400 at the end of the url.

Sounds ok, but where do I add the line mentioned above ??

Thanks in advanced

[Bill Robbins]

Frank,

Great question. When you’re creating a gallery, near the end of the process, WordPress gives you an option to choose between the linking to the “attachment page” or a “file.” To make it work with our lightbox, choose to link to the file and then insert the gallery.

Occasionally that doesn’t take. So a way to make sure is to click over to the “text” editor and look for something that looks like this:

and delete the ] at the end and replace it with this:

The complete shortcode would look like this:

Update your post and that should make the lightbox work properly.

Let me know if you have any trouble,
Bill

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