I’m in a bit of a quandary here, and maybe the solution is more simple than I fear. Hopefully others have had this kind of situation. I work for a newspaper, and we put out between 1-5 stories per day on our website. We’ve been using a very outdated theme for a while, and I’ve been tasked with making everything modern and awesome. After many weeks of research, I of course chose the Newspaper theme, because it looks wonderful.
Here’s the problem. Newspaper seems to be a very photo-intensive theme, but only maybe a third of the stories we post actually have photos. Also, we’ve been in business for many years and have around 5000 posts to deal with. When a post does not have a photo, it shows up on the home page (or individual category pages) as a light gray thumbnail with a “missing file” icon in there. Totally breaks up the beauty of the rest of the page.
Is there a way to set filters so that posts without photos will not be selected for the showcase with the big pictures? We don’t want news to NOT appear just because we didn’t illegally copy someone else’s photo for the sake of having a photo next to a story about a farmer’s market being cancelled this weekend. Not every story deserves a photo, but they do need to be seen. So, is there a way to let photo-equipped posts get the spotlight while stories without photos are still accessible and visible without the reader seeing what looks like broken file links?
Hello CVBJ_Creative,
As you know, the theme will display the featured image in blocks/modules on the pages. If the featured image was not been setup on the post, you will bring a placeholder with a message or something like this. Unfortunately, our theme does not have any such an option that allows you to automatically add a featured image to these posts,
unless you add them manually, sorry! Also, another alternative for you would be to use the Auto Post Thumbnails which automatically add the first image to your post to be featured image. You should try this plugin and check the results.
Thanks for the message!
The problem with that is that these posts have no images, and thus the first image in a post would not apply. Is the expectation that every post must have an image, or is there some fallback method for posts without images? Is there any layout option that features only post titles without a thumbnail? Or a way to filter posts based on whether or not they have an image?
Hello CVBJ_Creative,
If you will check our block list you will notice that our theme has some modules/blocks which do not use any featured image, as you can see here -> https://www.screencast.com/t/KmbjdkBKsT
Thanks for your understanding!
