NOTE: This plugin is not currently being maintained, support requests will not be responded to. I may come back to it at a later date, but it’s too unstable at the moment.

This plugin creates image replacements for HTML tags. Generally it will be used to replace the titles for posts, but it can replace any HTML tags with images of the text in any font (yes you can replace p tags, but this a Bad Idea^™).

It takes a different approach to the excellent Image Headlines Plugin from Cold Forged. Rather than changing the template files to specify which tags to replace with images, with this plugin you create a replacement in options and specify which HTML tags you want to replace (i.e. h1, h2, h3, etc.). It uses javascript to do the replacement at display time, so there is no need to edit the template files and therefore it will continue to work when you change templates.

It replaces the HTML tags you specify (in options) with an image of the text. So, if in your template you have your post titles set as a h3 tag, & you’d like them to be images, you go into the plugin’s options and create a new replacement for h3 tags and set the font, colour, size, etc. There is provision to limit to certain classes too (i.e. only replace h3 tags with a class of storytitle).

The obvious question is: Why create a plugin to do this when a perfectly good one already exists? Firstly let me say this is in no way a disparagement of the Image Headlines plugin, which is very cool, I just wanted a different way of doing it. With the Image Headlines plugin, you need to edit your template files to set which template tags you wanted to replace, which I’m far too lazy to do. Also if I disabled the plugin, it broke my template because it left -image- in front of the text. I also could have fixed this, but as I said, lazy.

The other reason was that if people have images turned off then they see the ugly alt text (in IE anyway, Firefox just displays it as plain, styelable text, but IE seems to need to highlight the fact that there’s a broken image). My Image Replacement plugin will not run if the user has either images or javascript turned off, it will just leave the tags alone as plain text that will be styled with CSS as per normal. Credit goes to Peter-Paul Koch for his script to check if the user’s browser can display images.

This plugin isn’t for everyone. A lot of people don’t like using javascript, so for them, the Cold Forged plugin would be much better.

This plugin is designed for WordPress 2+, but it should work with earlier versions. Please let me know if it doesn’t.

Installation

Download the zip file using the download link under ‘Plugin Information’. This zip file contains the latest stable version of the plugin, which is a php plugin file and a fonts folder containing one font (A Yummy Apology). Extract this zip file into your wp-content/plugins/ folder, then go to the plugins page in WordPress and activate the Image Replacements plugin. To use different fonts, simply copy the ttf or otf fonts into the wp-imagereplacement-fonts folder that is now in your plugins folder.

General Options

There are general options that apply to all image replacements, and they have mostly to do with caching. You can set whether to use the cache (highly recommended), where the cache files will be located and how many days before the cache is cleared. You can also set what the demo text is; this is just the text that you see on the options page as an example of the image replacement you’ve created.