Been poking at wordpress for the last few days and it’s starting to poke back a bit.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to have a thumbnail on one page and the full sized picture on another without having to add a bunch of excess code. The site(s) that I need this for are for collecting and/or selling books and I want to display the front and back covers of each. The location on each page will be the same.

The problem was having to do a lot of copy and paste on each page.

I spent days looking at image handling programs or plugins or anything with image in the name by the end of it as there doesn’t seem to be anything quite for that purpose.

So… I got to looking at the custom fields that WordPress has already built in. I looked around and found a plugin by the name of Get Custom Plugin Values that allows a whole lot of customizing using a few simple calls. This sucker rocks!!

It took me about 15 minutes to get it working and start converting the site over to use the new format. The way I have it set up allows me to add one custom field with the name of the file stripped of the ending (a=front cover b=back cover) and the .jpg. The code then adds the img= and all the prefix info. I could do most of the prefix with wordpress calls and I plan to at some point but for now this gets me past a bottleneck…

Then I got to thinking about it some more. With the addition of another custom field – price – and some added pre and post stuff I think this can turn any wordpress post into a “for sale” page. Planing on using paypal for the shopping cart and payment gateway, so that code is already done just got to plug it into place.

The only thing left is to see if it will work. With the proper code on the paypal return page I think I can clear the price field with so the item shows up sold. 😉 Inventory control at point of sale… Simple. I think.

Add a few category pages with different search criteria and it looks like wordpress can be a full e-commerce platform that also allows blogging…