Did you know that WordPress generates a thumbnail image file when uploading a PDF-file? This works when the PHP Extension imagick and Ghostscript is available! It won’t work with GD library! You know they are present and it’s working, when you upload a PDF-file in the media library and you immediately see a thumbnail of the file. Now that thumbnails are available my plugin hooks into the Gutenberg file-block to automagically inserting that thumbnail right before the file block. Besides that it also provides some more options:
Plugin Features
✔ a toggle to insert an preview image before the file block
✔ a toggle to link the preview image with the “link to” settings value of the file block
✔ a toggle to link the preview image with itself to the full-size image
✔ a toggle to enable the Lightbox-Effect on the preview image (enable in settings)
✔ a setting to choose the size of the preview image: thumbnail, medium, large
✔ a settings page to define default for image size and show inline embed default value and a height in pixels default value
✔ when activating the plugin, the show inline embed option of the file block gets disabled by default
✔ the preview image link target is based on setting of file-block (open in new tab)
✔ adds new block styles to file block with just a few inline css code
✔ this plugins main goal is to be very lightweight and avoid loading any additional assets and saving DOM performance. It just uses 3 files.
This plugin requires imagick and Ghostscript! A good WordPress web hosting has it installed by default.
Screenshots
Plugin usage in Gutenberg Editor
Plugin settings in detail
Additional block style variation
Plugin settings with default values
Usage in Block-Editor
Plugin General Settings