Lock in Header on Posts but use Featured Image for OG:Image? (Twenty Eleven)

  • mnixice · Member ·

    My community’s website uses a large Header image as a bannerhead for both the front page and for articles.

    We would like to be able to use the Featured Image function of WordPress to upload images into posts, which would create the needed OpenGraph OG:IMAGE data so that a unique graphic appears in easy content shares on social media. However, we typically do not want this Featured Image to actually appear on our site… some like showing a new image for every content piece, but we prefer our old Header. Without it, it can be confusing when residents come to the site from a link.

    The problem is, adding a Featured Image automatically sets it to become the new Header Image for that post, and we have never been able to figure out how to stop it from overtaking our Header?

    (*Not an ideal graphic for the site header due to inset text, obviously; it’s designed to work on FB or X)

    Every plugin I have tried for disabling Featured Image also disables the Header image, so instead of reverting back to Header, I get nothing — it just chops the top image off the page! And nothing I’ve read up about Header and Featured Image seems to distinguish their use cases. (One user a while back advised I create my Featured Image to be *just a bit too small* for WP’s minimum Featured Image size but *just big enough* for Facebook, and that actually works… but it’s a clumsy cheat and the images are obviously low in resolution.) I believe I can install a full-scale SEO plugin like Yoast SEO that will allow me to set the post’s og:image metadata to an image directly, but that’s a lot of downstream digging to find that toggle for every post. (Plus, I’d rather not mess around with such a specific solution in case our theme changed or WP updated or the plugin was discontinued.) And we can manually insert a social image into Facebook every time we post content there, but that doesn’t work for shares and it doesn’t help us maintain our images in our archives.

    So, I know from searching that this is an old frustrater which has been brought up before, but I have yet to see a clean solution… there a CSS edit in the Twenty Eleven Theme I could make which would reprioritize Header to retain it even if a Featured Image is added to a post? Is there a plugin I haven’t tried which would lock in the Header (or let me choose what to display up top)?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-heroponriki · Staff ·

    Hello!

    Thank you for reaching out to the free support forums for websites hosted on WordPress.com. While your site is not hosted with us, we’re here to guide you in the right direction for assistance.

    Since you’re using the open-source version of the WordPress platform, which operates differently from what we provide on WordPress.com, you can find help at the community forums here:

    https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/

    The community members in the open-source forum are well-versed in these matters and are in the best position to offer support.

    I hope this information helps guide you in the right direction. Feel free to ask if you have any further questions or need more assistance.

  • The topic ‘Lock in Header on Posts but use Featured Image for OG:Image? (Twenty Eleven)’ is closed to new replies.