Extract featured image from link mentioned in blog post

Question

You ever notice Google News has relevant images associated with its headlines?

How can I use WordPress to extract a featured image from an external webpage referenced in a blog post (or custom field)?

I'm open to any suggestions. I've seen this kind of functionality on a lot of web sites. There must be a way to do this with WP.

Answer 1

Found some plugins that may (or not) match your requirements. Using this query string in the repository.

• Super News ( Search Related News )
• ShrinkTheWeb (STW) Website Previews Plugin

But, there's one (WP-SnapAvatar) that although doesn't address the particulars, consists in a little and very interesting function, that I'll reproduce here:

/*
Plugin Name: WP-SnapAvatar
Version: 1.0
Plugin URI: http://darkx-studios.com/
Description: This plugin puts the commentor's website screenshot where there is no gravatar.
Author: Neacsu Alexandru
Author URI: http://darkx-studios.com
Copyright (c) 2008
Released under the GPL license
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
*/

function site_avatar_hook($baseCode) {
    $AutorUrl = get_comment_author_url();
    $PictureLink = "http://images.websnapr.com/?url=$AutorUrl";

    preg_match('@http://[^"\']+["\']@',$baseCode,$newSrc);
    $newSrc = $newSrc[0];

    if(trim($AutorUrl)){
        $httpSrc = substr($newSrc,0,strlen($newSrc) - 1) . "&nocatch=" . rand(10,100) ."&default=" . $PictureLink;
        $newAvatar=preg_replace('@src=(["\'])http://[^"\']+["\']@',"src='" . $httpSrc . "'",$baseCode);
    } else {
        $newAvatar = $baseCode; 
    }
    echo $newAvatar;
}

add_filter('get_avatar','site_avatar_hook',5,4);

For what you ask, I think that a combination of WP-SnapAvatar and this other one (Link Indication) would do the job.

But, I won't get into that otherwise I end up writing a new plugin :)