I can only get posts with ‘featured images’ displaying. If a post doesn’t have a featured image, the recentpost_visual should in theory take the first image within the post instead, but there appears to be a URL issue there (it needs a / at the front of the image URL I think)
To use the other parameters, I used:
{{recentposts_visual:“3”:“blog”:“true”:“200”}}
…though again the ‘true’ parameter to determine whether the date is shown or not doesn’t seem to be working either… (try with true or false, both display the date)
The “200” seems to work though (limiting the text to 200 characters)
Hi Ezchile. I have got a test page up that shows two posts from blog, complete with the image. The first (and only) image in the post. which is more than I was getting with previous release.
I am still having trouble with the featured image thing - ie how the heck do you do it?
But thats another story.
Also the date setting not working for me. It displays no matter what.
Create a folder in Media named featured_images (if it isn’t already there), then to attach a ‘featured image’ to a post, put the image you require in there, but named the same as the post it’s attached to…
So, for instance. If you create a blog post called ian.txt (unlikely, I know…) you then have to upload an image into /media/featured_images/ian.jpg (both the .txt file and image filenames the same)
Et Voila!
It’s strange to me that once this is done, there seems to be no visible way of checking everything is correct, or managing this other than manually… The blog post itself doesn’t show that it has a featured image when editing or anything… Nor can you easily tell if a post is missing a featured_image.
I’ve suggested that there needs to be a way to choose a featured image when you create or edit a blog post, and it should be from anywhere - any image you have previously uploaded and in any folder within /media, so hopefully in the future this will happen. Making featured images a two step thing in separate parts of the cms seems disjointed to me. ‘Other’ CMS’s use a similar technique…
Aha, thanks for the explanation. This does seem like a clunky way of doing things. When I explain it to clients they will no doubt say the same thing.
But the whole sharing of posts and their images via the social sharing icons still seems to be broken anyway.
This is why it being able to scrape the first image in the post as an alternative and use that instead of a featured_image is so important to me, my clients would baulk at the process as it stands. Also, duplication of assets would soon become an issue.
I really hope that things like this, which I feel are pretty fundamental to what is expected of a CMS are sorted out soon.
Weird…I have updated test site to latest release and its not working for me either:
and here is the tags used:
I thought that it may be because the tags were inside a block rather than being in the raw page code, but it makes no difference. Date is still there.
{{recentposts_visual:“2”:“blog”:“false”:“200”}}
I sent a private message to both you and @jdloudon to let you know about the quotes thing (which was what the problem was) I assume you both didn’t receive it?
I agree, code blocks are the best practice, but it's all too easy to copy and paste a tag that's written in the forum by another to test, that's where they crept in! (Well, that's the story I'm sticking to, anyway)
Allrighty then, all working as it should. Thanks Michael for adding this, its an excellent addition to the system and just what I had in mind. The only possible improvement could maybe be the addition of some way to manage the height of each post box to keep things neat, maybe using Flex.
Of course the proper way to do it would be to make sure that images used are all the same dimensions, and coupled with a limit of characters displayed this would ensure consistency.
But a lot of clients dont seem to have the skills to be able to size pictures.
Having said that I am not suggesting that Pulse adds big chunks of code to aid complete novices. We must assume a basic degree of understanding principles. I have seen what happens when you make a CMS with complete drag and drop functionality that is idiot-proof. You end up with an unholy mess of code like certain other site builder applications. All of which begin with W.
I am all in favour oof keeping Pulse the lean mean machine.
Cheers/
Yes, I have created a test blog, each with some text and a single image. Then made a block containing our code above. Nothing further was required for it to work here:
It should auto scan for the first image and pull that in
I think the "/" you mentioned is as you have it installed in a sub-folder? e.g. /pulsecms5/
@jdloudon has it in the root so that seems to be working .. we'll add something to make non root installs work with this.
@jdloudon - glad it is working for you! In terms of styling, that recent post visual layout is already using Flexbox so feel free to amend the CSS to your liking.
You're right regarding the images. Maybe for now it's best to recommend to the client to pre update the images to the right side or go to /media and use the Crop feature inside there?
The last value "200" is the word count limit.
Thanks - us too
But let us bear in mind how to improve on this..
