Introducing Genesis Minimum Images Extended – GMIE
One of the first things I fell in love with in the new Minimum 2.0 child theme was the large banner image on the homepage. Then I was sold on using it more and more (I’m running it on 2 of my own sites) when I saw the banner was also on the single post pages.
Then I noticed an issue with it that affects the social media sharing (hi, Pinterest) and the grid loop or archive settings when displaying the featured images I was creating. When there is only one featured image assigned to a post or page, regardless of them thumbnail sizes that can be created, aspect ratio is often king. Pinterest (unlike Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn) doesn’t even allow you to scroll to another image, so you’re stuck with the original image AND aspect ratio of the featured image.
Most great things people use come out of having a need or want and finding a solution. This is my solution to this dilemma. Never having written or published a plugin before, I sought out the teaching help of Nick Croft, Robert Neu, and Brandon Kraft to release Genesis Minimum Images Extended, known by us as GMIE. Even the legendary Bill Erickson contributed some assistance with portions of code that included his work with Custom Metaboxes (CMB).
How it works
It’s rather simple (and we have an update to some tiny improvements in the next day or two). We’re all familiar with featured images for posts/pages, right? Well, the stock use of that in Minimum 2.0 is to also make that into the banner image below the header in single posts and pages. To fit the 1600px width of the theme’s CSS, that calls for a 600px tall image.
Who wants a 600px tall image pushing down their valuable content? That’s fine for the homepage like a big banner (like I’m using now), but not for posts. I quickly started shrinking the banner images to 350px on down to 250px. That was making for awkward slivers of images on the homepage grid loop, blog index page, and in Pinterest (see above).
My only solution at the time was to disable the images in the blog index and homepage. That made my content very plain until people arrived at my posts. I didn’t like that.
No longer is that the solution with GMIE. Now you can select another image to be used for the banner and you can make it any wonky aspect ratio you want and still keep a beautiful featured image for social media and the other uses Genesis has for featured images, such as the featured widgets and more. Just treat it like you would the featured image function and it’ll automatically appear below your header.
Why don’t you give it a try on your own Minimum 2.0 sites/projects and see how you like it?