Twenty Eleven: display featured images on pages even if they are too small for header

[murky]

With twentyeleven, if there is a featured image, it takes the place of the header.... if it's big enough.

A smaller featured image is, as far as I can see, ignored. This caused much consternation due to the conflict with twentyeleven using featured images, but not having them appear.

There should be code which says 'if featured image is big enough, use it on the single page header' (as now)

BUT ALSO: 'If the image is SMALLER than this, use it as a featured image on summary pages'

Ideally: If the top post on a summary page has a featured image big enough to use in the header, use it there, too.

[duck_]

#18027 #13671 #14898

I think there should probably be some way of a theme adding text to the featured image metabox giving the required image size.

[ryno267]

+1

[nacin]

Looks like the patches on #18027 should work here.

[lancewillett]

Needs a refresh and testing, we can get this into 3.6.

[lancewillett]

I'm also open to opinions on "wontfixing" this -- if featured images all of a sudden appear on thousands of blogs, that could be considered "broken" and not a good user experience.

Might have to chalk it up to "learn for the future" and leave as-is.

[murky]

Although, how many featured images would be used if there was no obvious result in using them? For users like this, there'd be no effect as no featured image will have been chosen....

(Though given its now 2013, I could see that TwentyEleven theme may not be priority :)

[lancewillett]

We'd like to continue improving Ten, Eleven, and Twelve as we go along. That's fine, if something makes sense we'll fix it.

But, I'm asking if it's a good improvement or not.

[murky]

I can see your concern about making a change which has loads of images appear - but this will only happen where featured images are used (and here, the images will have been chosen, so will work).

I can see that, in many case, people will have played with featured images only to see no effect - and then stopped playing with them - for these folks, no change.

How you go with this? Entirely up to you guys.... but if it helps, the original ticket was as a result of confusion arising from spending time with featured images not behaving as it seemed they should.

[DrewAPicture]

Replying to lancewillett:

... if featured images all of a sudden appear on thousands of blogs, that could be considered "broken" and not a good user experience.

Might have to chalk it up to "learn for the future" and leave as-is.

I vote wontfix. The theme has been out for some time now and there is an expected result if the featured image isn't big enough. A change like this could easily be construed as "this is broken, it didn't work like this before."