This might not seem like a big deal, but I finally got the image headers working properly.

Basically, I need an image there to be of the character/creator/series/edition/etc IF there is an image file in the specified folder.

If not, I wanted it to “fail gracefully” by using some kind of filler image. I couldn’t figure out a way to do it that worked for every browser until today.

With a nudge in the right direction from the wordpress subreddit, I finally got this code (or versions of it for tags and categories) working:

<?php
if ( is_tax(‘marvel-character’) ) {
$image_url=”http://www.tradereadingorder.com/default-images/marvel.jpg”;
$term = get_term_by( ‘slug’, get_query_var( ‘term’ ), get_query_var( ‘taxonomy’ ) );
$image_path =”ABSOLUTE/SERVER/PATH” .$term->slug.”.jpg”;
if ( file_exists($image_path) ) {
$image_url = “http://www.tradereadingorder.com/marvel-character-image/” .$term->slug.”.jpg”;
}
echo ‘<img src=”‘ . $image_url. ‘”>’;
}
?>

Sweet, huh? Took a few hours of tweaking to finally get it right, with some misplaced punctuation and figuring out the root path thing (originally I was just trying the regular path, but that doesn’t work for file_exists.) Also, I was first told about the function as “file_exist” – missing that all important “s” at the end!

While getting it implemented for each taxonomy and testing the results, I found that the novel-series one isn’t working for some reason. I’ve sought after help to figure this out. The code is exactly the same for this taxonomy as every other one, so I don’t know why it isn’t working. Anyway, we’ll figure it out sooner or later – or I’ll just make a new taxonomy that does work. WordPress is awful quirky sometimes.

Edit: There’s still something wrong with the novel-series category slug, but again the wordpress subreddit to the rescue. We’re setting a custom rewrite for that one taxonomy, so it displays as a somewhat cumbersome novel–series, but at least it works. I have no idea why the original doesn’t, but maybe it could be fixed in the future. Let me know if you see anything else that’s broken.

Here are the new header images:

4 Comments