I’m excited to announce the new WordPress Featured Images In RSS plugin. It adds a site’s blog post featured images to the RSS feed of the site, with options for image size and positioning. I’ve seen lots of blog posts cover how to add this functionality to a theme by editing the theme’s functions file and manually adding the code (including one I wrote for Fandom Marketing), but 99% of the folks I talk to don’t understand how to do that. So, this plugin was born. I’ve also seen a few other plugins that do the same thing, but none with the size and positioning options, instead asking you to edit the plugin directly to make those changes (which is a terrible idea – it’ll get overwritten with any update).

Once the plugin is installed, and then activated, you can view and change the two options under Settings. The first option is the size of the featured image to be included in the RSS feed: thumbnail (default), medium, large, or full size. These sizes are references to actual media pixel dimensions that are set and can be customized under your Media Options. The second option is the position of the image, either on the left above the text (default), centered above the text, or left with the text wrap to the right of the image. For RSS-to-email campaigns in Mailchimp or other email marketing providers, I recommend the default settings.

The options page links to the Media Options page to raise awareness of those settings, and also conveniently links to Feedburner’s ping page, which refreshes the feed, if that service is being used.

I’d love to have you try the plugin on your site, and leave a comment with your thoughts.

The plugin is not available in the WordPress plugin repository (yet), but can be installed by downloading it using the link below, and then uploading it through the Plugin -> Add New -> Upload interface in your WordPress dashboard.

You can download the plugin here. (Once it’s in the repository, I’ll update this post.)