Thumbnails not showing in blog

Question

I am trying to add thumbnails to a wordpress blog (that was created by someone else). As a newcomer to Wordpress I understand I need to add "the_post_thumbnail();" inside "the loop" but looking at the index.php file I dont see that there is a loop.

If you look at the code you can see i have tried to insert the the_post_thumbnail(); but looking at the front end http://www.chcdev.co.uk/blog/ there are still no thumbnails. (Yes I added a featured image to the posts aswell). Can any of you clever people shed any light on this?

<div id="main" class="grid_11">


<?php

// Settings
$blog_ids    = array(5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,28);
$news_limit  = 15;
$excerptsize = 250;
$pipes_url   = 'http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?   _id=ffc88cc14e18d87eb77c214c27f84e02&_render=json';

// Fetch recent posts for each blog and add them to an array indexed by date
foreach ($blog_ids as $b) {
switch_to_blog($b);
$posts = get_posts('&numberposts='.$news_limit.'&order=DESC&orderby=post_date');
foreach ($posts as $p) {
    $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['permalink'] = get_permalink($p->ID);
    $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['date']      = date("j", strtotime($p->post_date_gmt));
    $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['month']     = date("M", strtotime($p->post_date_gmt));
    $author_arr  = get_userdata($p->post_author);
    $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['author']    = $author_arr->display_name;
    $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['title']     = $p->post_title;
    $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['content']   = preg_replace('|\[(.+?)\](.+?\[/\\1\])?|s', '', strip_tags($p->post_content, '<p>'));
    $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['excerpt']   = '<p>' . substr( $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['content'], 0, strrpos( substr( $news_tmp[strtotime($p->post_date_gmt)]['content'], 0, $excerptsize), ' ' ) ) . '...</p>';
}
}

// Fetch Yahoo pipes data and add them to an array indexed by date
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $pipes_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$data  = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$pipes = json_decode($data, true);
$c=1;
foreach ($pipes['value']['items'] as $pipe) {
$d_parts = explode(' ', $pipe['pubDate']);
$t_parts = explode(':', $d_parts[4]);
$d = $d_parts[1]." ".$d_parts[2]." ".$d_parts[3]." ".$d_parts[4];
$news_tmp[strtotime($d)]['permalink'] = $pipe['link'];
$news_tmp[strtotime($d)]['date']      = ltrim($d_parts[1], '0');
$news_tmp[strtotime($d)]['month']     = $d_parts[2];
$news_tmp[strtotime($d)]['author']    = 'Yahoo!';
$news_tmp[strtotime($d)]['title']     = $pipe['title'];
$c++;
if ($c == $news_limit) {break;}
}

// Sort by the index (date)
ksort($news_tmp);

// Trim array to requested number of posts
$news = array_slice(array_reverse($news_tmp), 0, $news_limit);

// Display

foreach ($news as $n) {

echo "          <div class=\"newspost\">\n";
echo "              <h2><a href=\"".htmlentities($n['permalink'])."\"     title=\"Permalink to ".$n['title']."\" target=\"_blank\">".$n['title']."</a></h2>\n";

echo "<div class=\"thumbnailmt\">\n";    
 the_post_thumbnail(); 
echo "          </div>\n";

if( $n['author'] != 'Yahoo!') {
    echo "              <span class=\"author\">Written by: ".$n['author']." on " . $n['month'] . " " . $n['date'] . "</span>\n";
}
else{
    echo "              <span class=\"author\">Generated by Yahoo!     Pipes. Written on " . $n['month'] . " " . $n['date'] . "</span>\n";
}
echo "              <div class=\"main-divider\"></div>\n";
echo "              " . $n['excerpt'] . "\n";
echo "          </div>\n";
echo "          <!-- END NEWS ITEM -->\n";


}

switch_to_blog(19);
?>


</div><!-- END MAIN -->

Answer 1

The loop term in WP refers to concept of iterating over post objects and (typically) filling global variables with data of current one.

It can be identified by one of:

• the_post() function calls (main loop)
• $some_variable->the_post() method calls (secondary loops using WP_Query object)
• setup_postdata( $post ) (more raw version, working with array of post objects)

In your case this doesn't really happen and would be problematic, because rather than iterating on set of posts ($posts = get_posts() their data is completely torn apart and rewritten into custom arrays which end up in $news through which your output loops.

Really most of this would have to be rewritten to hammer it into normal WP loop.

The path of least resistance would probably be:

1. store $p->ID with other data, when processing it
2. use get_the_post_thumbnail() function, which accepts ID argument for post to work on, instead of relying on global variable