073 – Setting a Facebook Thumbnail Image

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Listener Feedback

Question from Marianne
If I update my theme will my modifications in any of the theme’s contents that I don’t have in my child theme disappear/break? In my child theme I have a style.css file but I have made other modifications in the original theme’s header.php and also dropped a favicon.ico in the original theme’s main directory. Should I be making a header.php file in the child theme?

Basically any file that is not in the child theme is susceptible to disappear when a theme gets updated. I don’t know exactly how you have things set up, but I would recommend moving all of your custom changes to your child theme.

Question from Andy
I have been working on a project lately and was wondering if there are any chat plugins you would recommend for wordpress, that is like a chat room and only registered members can view. I would prefer it to be like a bar on the bottom of the screen but it doesn’t have to be. I have seen so many plugins that I don’t know which one would be the best. Again, thank you for all the help you have provide me and my xbox group.

Probably the best solution is to add BuddyPress to your WordPress site. You can use BuddyPress to control your registered users. Then you can install the Buddypress-Ajax-Chat plugin to add a chat feature.

Audio Question from J. Christopher
How to set up a Facebook thumbnail image.
Method #1:

• Find an image you want to use to represent your site. You could use a logo, an image from the site, or even a screenshot.
• Before you upload the screenshot, use some image software to crop and edit it just the way you want it to look on the site. For loading purposes, I’d shink it down to 250px wide or less and compress it.
• Upload the image. It’s best if you upload it to the actual website you’re generating a preview for.
• Add a image source meta tag to the head of your document.

The tag looks like this:

< link rel="image_src"href="http://site.com/image.jpg">

Method #2:
Add this code to thesis custom_functions.php file or your child theme’s functions.php file:

function add_facebook_open_graph_tags() {
  if (is_single()) {
      global $post;
      $image = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'thesis_post_image', $single = true);
      if (!$image)
      $image = 'ENTER URL TO DEFAULT IMAGE HERE';
    ?>
<meta property="og:title" content="<?php the_title(); ?>" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php echo $image; ?>" />
<meta property="og:url" content="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" />
<meta property="og:description" content="<?php echo 
get_bloginfo('description'); ?>" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="<?php echo get_bloginfo('name'); ?>" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="ENTER YOUR FACEBOOK USER ID HERE" />
    <?php }
}
add_action('wp_head', 'add_facebook_open_graph_tags',99);

Method #3:
Facebook Meta Tags Plugin

Helpful hints:

• Facebook caches the preview images, so if you recently tried to generate a preview and you’re still not having luck try waiting.
• Adding an img_src share preview image may take away the ability to let users select from various images when sharing your site. This code tells sites which image to chose rather than gives the user some options.

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