If you love featured images in WordPress and wish you could see them at a glance from the list of posts/pages, this is for you. I was up early this morning and saw this tweet:
My #GenesisWP enhancement wish list: display the featured image in the dashboard (like WooCommerce does with products).
— Susan Ramsey (@onehappystudio) September 3, 2015
Now, before you read any farther, if you are already a Display Featured Image for Genesis user, you can go back to your regularly scheduled programming, because this is done for you. If you don’t want all the bells and whistles of that plugin, though, and a lot of people don’t need them, then read on.
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But I saw Susan’s tweet and thought to myself, “Challenge ACCEPTED” because, well, I’ve already done this one before. The long and short of it is that I spent a bit of time and extracted the relevant code into a simple plugin.
Add a Featured Image Column to WordPress
Although I too would love to see this functionality in my website, I’m not sure that it really belongs in the Genesis Framework–or else, I think that if it should be added, it maybe should just be added to WordPress itself instead. After all, WordPress already creates multiple columns in the admin, for the title, author, date, etc. It’s pretty easy to evaluate if a post type can support a featured image, and add a column for that accordingly, although it takes a few steps.
So, for your improved administration experience, I give to you a small but useful plugin: Add Featured Image Column (to WordPress). I opted to create a plugin rather than write this as a tutorial, because it takes enough work to merit its own system. This works with any theme, because it uses just WordPress functionality. The code itself is extracted in its entirety from my Display Featured Image for Genesis plugin.
Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action (on a local install running Twenty Fifteen with demo content):
Yes, that’s it. Feel free to download and use this plugin. I’d love to know if you find it useful!
This is great. Any reason it’s not in the Plugin Directory?
Because I was feeling lazy when I put it together and doing the readme for the repository would take a bit more time than I felt like spending. But I did think that it is probably worth doing, since the hard part of actually writing the code is done–although to go in the repository, I would probably add back in the filters I removed when I copied them over.
Give me a few days and I may end up submitting it, if it seems like there is enough interest. Thanks!