Christopher's Newspaper Rantings !

Hi, folks
because a nice lady just called me on the phone asking about support for this theme, I would like to reconfirm I am not on the support team for tagDiv, and have no relationship other than being a customer, of the company.

For those looking for my various posts, rantings, suggestions, advice, blah blah, I think you can find them all here:
https://forum.tagdiv.com/users/neotrope/

For info on the tagDiv staff/team, their bios/background and photos, please see:
http://themeforest.net/user/tagDiv

Hope that helped folks who were curious about any of that. 🙂

While just a customer, thanks for all of your posts on the theme. It has help me out tremendously in a few areas.

-MC

aw shucks .. you’re most welcome. My way of “paying forward” all the help I’ve gotten in forums over the years 🙂

Hi, Radu
no worries on name/company, etc.

I am pretty easy to find online. I added a note on my profile, that I’m not the tech support to call (I’m not the droid you’re looking for!) 🙂

Anything you can do for the resizing would be awesome.

The issue we have is essentially something like this:

1) we have mothership >>> pushes out news to our state/local site hubs
2) the local site pulls in both local versions, and national versions (news not from that state); so state news from the mothership goes into the main site content, featured on home page; national news is secondary, not featured
3) since the image for local news items are uploaded by FTP, not media manager, we use a theme running timthumb to auto generate the thumbs around site and featured homepage; for national news, timthumb grabs the national news item photos hosted on the mothership (external images) and builds the local thumbs for national category index and side of page (sidebar) stuff
4) so, when moving to something like newspaper, which needs a “featured image” – we can use Auto Post Thumbnail PRO to at least get the “first image in post” (whether from local FTP or external hosted mothership for national items) to the featured image spot/field.
5) so… now how do we get larger image for the featured categories and homepage when the root images are 500×375 and need minor increase? Normally timthumb — not possible with modern themes. Hence the issue. We’re not the only one with this kind of thing. And so my “will pay you big bucks” to solve for us, as we need to move to a modern theme away from Woo Canvas which replaced our old in-house theme. Canvas works, but has none of the micro-data, tricky stuff, modern menus, blah blah.

It seems we can solve the set first image in post with the commercial Auto Post Thumbnail Pro, but then the hangup is getting larger versions of those images for the featured boxes/layouts. We can’t start with GIANT images, for various reasons related to syndication, systems loading the images dynamically on their own sites, as well as images clients have, and/or “best fit” for layouts on news portals.

And we don’t want to do “width=100%” kinds of things, as we’d get tons of “you should be using actual size images…” warnings for pagespeed insights.

Anyway………. epic poem at an end.

Anything you can come up with will be most welcome. This is the last “need it!” issue which WP should have as option but they are opposed to for their own philosophical reasons and because the code is also used for wordpress.com (sigh).

Heck, if you solved it, you could probably offer a commercial plugin for it. Or offer an “Newspaper Enterprise” edition for $100 that included the feature. Those of us who need it, would pay, since we’re not part of the “free economy” whining about not getting 40 hours of free training with their $50 theme 😉

OR: offer an enterprise theme outside of Themeforest/Envato … no restrictions.