Add Set Featured Thumbnail (post_thumbnails) support to any wordpress3 theme

There area a lot of so-called “Premium” themes which are supporting WordPress 3.x. However not everyone of them is perfectly up-to-date with all the WP3 features, eg they don’t implement the  “Set Featured Thumbnails” function.  Here’s a solution:

In this article Rusty Smith explains how  make use of “Set Featured Thumbnails”  in Arthemia, editing four files: functions.php, index.php, archive.php and the stylesheet. Since Arthemia originally makes use of the Timthumb script,  the deal is to make rid if it and substitute it with the post_thumbnail function.

Just check the instructions here: Post Thumbnails and Arthemia

As for its commercial brother, Arthemia Premium, your mileage may vary: you’ll probably have to look for a slightly different code (starting with a condition) and modifiy it like this:

<!-- keeping theme condition -->

<?php $status = get_settings ( "cp_thumbAuto" );
    if ( $status != "first" ) { ?>

<!-- adding post_thumbnails support snippet -->

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'featured-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

<!-- end of the main post_thumbnails support snippet -->

<?php } else { ?>

<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'featured-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

<?php } ?>

<!-- end of theme condition -->

Please note that

1) the code above is redundand but i wanted to keep the structure of the theme.  One can also make it much shorter, using only the two-line snippet which is marked with comments

2) the line  <?php the_post_thumbnail( ‘featured-thumbnail’ ); ?></a>

will be different if you are editing the chunck of code which is referred to the smallest image named “featured-thumbnail” or to the biggest “headline-thumbnails” (see functions.php), so you’ll alternatively use:

<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'headline-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

or

<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'spoiler-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

or

<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'featured-thumbnail' ); ?></a>

Other themes that lack the “post_thumbnails” features can be modified using the same principles, eg using the older but still useful tutorial from Mark Iaquith: New in WordPress 2.9: Post Thumbnail Images.

Have fun!