This site is built on the wonderfully easy to set up, and yet quite powerful, WordPress. For the “look and feel” of the site, I decided on using the Xanadu theme, but was not happy with the way it was displaying the Featured Images. For instance, here is the Featured Image I chose for one of my posts:
However, here is how it displayed on the Slider on the homepage:
Bad Xanadu Slider Display Image
So, I decided to look under the hood of the Xanadu theme. There were three files (archive.php, slider.php, and index.php) that were having issues displaying the images. It appears that both where utilizing the TimThumb library to manipulate images (great library btw). In both files, I noticed that the calls to the TimThumb library were passing the ‘zc’ parameter with a value of 1. WTH does ‘zc’ stand for? A quick Google search led me to the Binary Moon web site where I learned that ‘zc’ stands for ‘zoom & crop’. More importantly, however, I learned that simply changing this parameter to ’2′ meant that TimThumb would “Resize proportionally to fit entire image into specified dimensions, and add borders if required”. Well, that sounds exactly like what I want. Let’s take a look at the results:
Good Xanadu Slider Display Image
Yay! Problem solved … do the Happy Dance!