Introducing: Instant Featured Image

While WordPress is, I believe, the perfect platform for pretty much any kind of online publishing, it does have some occasional UX inconveniences. The great thing is that, due to the extensible nature of the platform, most of these inconveniences can be fixed via plugins. Enter Instant Featured Image.

Like my Quick Empty Trash plugin, Instant Featured Image simply adds a single additional button to the WordPress UI, but it makes a significant difference to the post editing experience.

What is it?

Instant Featured Image boosts the WordPress UI by adding a new button alongside the ‘Insert into post’ button in the media manager modal. When clicked, this button will insert your selected media and then, if you have selected an image, set that image as the post’s featured image. It is possible to select multiple media items to insert, so this plugin will set the last image in the selected set as the featured image.

Who is it built for?

I originally built this plugin specifically for Remkus de Vries as he tweeted about a need for this exact solution:

Insert image into post AND set it as featured image in one go .. anyone done that already http://t.co/gemSB5h3nw ?

— Remkus de Vries (@remkusdevries) June 25, 2014

I agreed that it would be a very useful addition to WordPress and went ahead with building it for him and anyone else who found a use for it.

Ultimately though, Instant Featured Image is useful for anyone who deals with images in their blog posts and almost always uses one of the content images as the featured image. In fact, it’s seen as something so useful that WP Tavern wrote about it shortly after I released it.

Why did I build it?

I built this plugin to help out someone who needed it, but I also saw a gap in the WordPress UI that really needed closing. The plugin was fun to build and, while it’s something I rarely have a need for myself, I’m glad I built it to help those who do have a strong need for something like this.

[wp-pic type=”plugin” slug=”instant-featured-image” align=”center” layout=”large”]