My use case. I am creating a subforum listing a music groups song/video releases. I am only placing a line of text and a YouTube video in the post. If I click on one of the tags I used for the post, and view the the tag page, it just shows a blank colored image as the cover image for that post. Initially I would like to use the YT videos thumbnail as this image that would show up in grid view, which I download myself, but I do not want to place this image in the post itself. The YT video already shows this image in the post.

basically ...

Is there any way to feature a image as a "cover image" for a post, without the image actually being inserted in the post itself?

@Ehren


Thank you.

8 hours ago, SC36DC said:

My goodman @Adriano Faria

is this something you could possibly put together?

https://www.sosinvision.com.br/index.php?/forums/forum/104-requests/

👍

We are toying with the idea of allowing some more 'meta' tag tools for moderators when creating a topic so they can set an o:image for sharing purposes, and also for showing the featured image in other areas.

1 hour ago, Matt said:

We are toying with the idea of allowing some more 'meta' tag tools for moderators when creating a topic so they can set an o:image for sharing purposes, and also for showing the featured image in other areas.

Thanks for the update. If that becomes a feature, I’d love you toy around with it, too! 🚂

On 2/12/2025 at 5:29 AM, SC36DC said:

Do you know of an existing guide that can help get me going in the right direction with trying to put this together as you’ve described? Thank you.

OK so a really quick way you can make this happen is by creating a new Pages database and using the default options to enable record thumbnail/images that live across the suite. Here's a basic how-to:

^ Go to your AdminCP, head to the Pages section, then create a new Database to work with.

^ Call it whatever you like, and add a description if you want to. The rest of the options aren't super-important for this exercise, but feel free to play with them later once you get things set up.

^ The only other option I tweaked for this exercise was the "Listing Layout" view under 'Display'. I set it to 'Grid' to better illustrate the result you're looking for (which is having records with images displayed in a listing), but again you can play with these later as you like.

^ Go back to the 'Databases' page in AdminCP and you'll see your new database there. You can set all sorts of options from this page, such as posting permissions (do you want only staff to post videos on your site, or do you want to open it up to members too?), categories etc. Click 'Manage Fields' in the dropdown to check something.

^ You just want to make sure that the 'Record Image' field is enabled and active. You can also create a new custom field just for adding YouTube video thumbnail images, but the easiest method is simply using this default field.

^ Time to visit your page, so you can add a record.

^ Once on the front-end, click 'Add New Record' and select a category to post your record within (if you've added custom ones, like 'Music' or something).

^

^ From there, it's super simple. You'll post your YouTube video title in the Title field, add any tags you like, and embed the video into the content field - just like if you were making a forum topic. The only difference here is the 'Image' field at the bottom - you can upload a thumbnail to include which will display both on the record page and any listing/promotion pages related to that record across the suite.

^ This is the result of the record page, after posting. You could probably tighten up the design by using custom templates and fields (for example, you could use custom templates/css to hide the cover photo if you only want the thumbnail to appear in listings and not on the record itself), but otherwise this is a really good-looking and simple way of doing it.

^ Here's what your new database record looks like on the /videos/ landing page, and on listings related to your videos database. Gives you the headline, description and the thumbnail just as you'd like it.

^ The thumbnail is also displayed in areas where that sort of thing is supported, such as Tag pages. So if you create a 'Music' tag for specific videos in your database, for example, and then visit the 'Music' tag page, the thumbnail will be displayed with the record link in the same way.

Hope this helps!!!

1 hour ago, opentype said:

Right. Use {$value|raw} instead of {$value}. That will fix it.

This indeed fixed it.

Regarding customizing the look of it on the front end, I asked Deepseek about it, and it gave me this code, which worked perfectly.

Code

{{if $formValue}}

<div style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; color: #333; background-color: #f9f9f9; padding: 10px; border-radius: 5px; border: 1px solid #ddd;">

<strong style="color: #555;">{$label}:</strong> <br>

<span style="color: #777;">{$value|raw}</span>

</div>

{{endif}}

Thanks again for the help!!! 🙏🏼

You're very welcome @SC36DC ! More than happy to help, glad you were able to get it working the way you like it too!

4 hours ago, Ibai said:

I'm also very interested in the ability of setting up a cover image for a topic!

Desperately needed this for years, mainly so when sharing to social media it has an image relative to it

On 2/12/2025 at 12:42 PM, Matt said:

We are toying with the idea of allowing some more 'meta' tag tools for moderators when creating a topic so they can set an o:image for sharing purposes, and also for showing the featured image in other areas.

Any news

5 hours ago, marklcfc said:

Desperately needed this for years, mainly so when sharing to social media it has an image relative to it

Any news

This would definitely be a major feature update, even for those who don't realize it.

19 hours ago, marklcfc said:

Desperately needed this for years, mainly so when sharing to social media it has an image relative to it

Yep, that's the main reason!

My users are not allowed to attach images in my forum. I promote topic in social media and I'm forced to edit first post and attach and show an image that usually I wouldn't do.