Thumbnail Change in Elegant Themes – Coldstone Nature

I’m using Elegant Theme’s Coldstone theme (an old theme that is no longer offered) with the Nature option for explore.globalcreations.com. By default the theme displays four banner-style thumbnails (470×110) on the home page followed by square thumbnails (62X62) for any additional posts listed there. I decided that I wanted to see banner style thumbnails on all the posts. It took help from two of the great support people at Elegant Theme’s, but ultimately the fix was easy.

The first recommendation I got, and that had no effect, was to edit default.php as follows:

default.php If it’s not already there, copy /wp-content/themes/ColdStone/includes/default.php to /wp-content/themes/ColdStone-child/includes/default.php. Then edit the file in the child theme by finding

$width = 62;
$height = 62;

and changing it to:

$width = 470;
$height = 110;

Since this changes the dimensions of the thumbnails it looks like this would be all that it takes. But, no.  It doesn’t affect the way these thumbnails are displayed because that size is set in magazine.php.  The above modification is not needed at all.

Instead, we need to edit magazine.php as follows:

magazine.php  If it’s not already there copy /wp-content/themes/ColdStone/includes/magazine.php to /wp-content/themes/ColdStone-child/includes/magazine.php. Then edit the file in the child theme by finding

<?php if ($i <= 4) { ?>

and changing it to

<?php if ($i <= 400) { ?>

In a little more context the code looks like this:

<?php if ($i <= 4) { ?>
<?php $width = 470;
$height = 110;

It’s saying to use the larger thumbnail only for the first four items in a list.  The change applies it to the first 400 items in the list.  The 400 is arbitrary and could be any number you wish.  The result is that the first 400 posts in the list – over multiple pages – will have the banner-style thumbnail.