[muranomidwest]

@cacarlyle – did you find a solution without building it yourself? Given that the entire world experiences link previews every day, it is rather stunning that there this isn’t universally supported throughout every WP app, kinda like bold and italics – except that image previews like this are actually used more frequently than those text stylings these days 😉

[muranomidwest]

Hmmm – for anyone thinking that rtMedia was actually doing anything for bbPress – they are not. They’re still “considering it” and the plugin offers no functionality for bbPress users that isn’t mediated by BuddyPress – free, paid or bundled with a theme. Zip, zero, nada, nothing. Do not be deceived by bbPress references in their plugin descriptions. After some conversation with them about it, I would be surprised if they ever add bbPress support.

Given the bad decision from BP upfront to use their own database, coupled with the fact that there are virtually no BuddyPress plugins left that really work in the modern WP world, it was silly for rtMedia to hitch their wagon to this the black star that is BuddyPress.

bbPress has plenty of limitations and should have kept up better, but it generally plays nice with the rest of the WP world. Its universe is infinitely larger at this point.

[muranomidwest]

I’m willing to give it a shot. There have been requests for this functionality for the better part of 10 years and not a single meaningful response.

You seem to have the ability to do some cool things. What is the resistance on this issue about?

If we need to be educated, please educate us. To simply not respond, pretend you don’t understand and/or tell everyone who asks that they are dumb to ask is not very productive.

[muranomidwest]

I’m confused as to why there is simply no featured image for Topics. This makes bbPress virtually unusable for any purpose other than tech support and ticket management. I would suggest there are better tools for that anyway.

If you are trying to manage a blogging platform, every single post, in this case a topic, simply MUST have the option of attaching a featured image. Reasonable people could have always agreed to disagree how important the security aspects of uploading images are or are not, but that horse has long since left the barn.

Assuming we either trust our community or really just don’t care about whatever concern drove this decision, why can’t we simply have a featured image that people who are uncomfortable can turn off?

Can you offer even one single reason why we don’t have this?

[muranomidwest]

I’m surprised that this issue persists. We are looking to develop an interactive blog function in which everyone sees images on everything all the time, without needing to realize that they are in WP and bbPress handles everything but images well. Even with Mediapress or any of the various image attachment and styling plugins, the limitations on displaying image posts persists.

Assuming that I’m not interested in someone else’s concern over the integrity of the uploaded files, has anyone found a plugin, piece of PHP or any other means to display the posts in a topic or forum, along a thumbnail image?

I feel like by this point, we should be able to display topic indexes and posts as a list, a grid, masonry or something that looks rather like FB, all with images included.

What is the obstacle, and more importantly, are there solutions?