Version 1.1 offered a dropdown to specify using the caps on “Home Page and Individual Posts” or just “Individual Posts only”. As Marco pointed out, this didn’t allow for pages to use the plugin at all (in fact, I was hard-coding the plugin to skip pages entirely).

This has been changed to three checkboxes on the Options page now:

1. Home Page
2. Individual Posts
3. Pages

Thanks again, Marco, for great input!

One thing to note with these options. I’m sure that it’s possible to figure this out, but for right now, I haven’t been able to do this. If you have used the option to have a static home page, WordPress doesn’t seem to recognize that with the is_home() function. If anyone has any thoughts on how to detect if a page is the static home page, I would appreciate it.

For now, if you have a specified page as the home page, the “home page” option in Decorative Caps really does nothing at all.

The following changes have been made:

• An options page has been added to allow the user control over most facets of the image display
• User can create a class in their own CSS stylesheet, if they wish, and specify that class name to be used for the image display. Note: If you specify a class name, all other CSS options (height, width, etc.) are ignored, so make sure you specify all of those options in the CSS class you have created.
• An option exists now (thanks to Marco who commented on the original version of the plugin!) to specify whether the Decorative Caps should appear on both the home page and post pages, or just individual post pages.

For more information and to download the plugin, visit the plugin’s page.

Update September 1, 2007: Version 1.1 has been released. The major change in this version is that an options page has been created to allow the user control over the CSS styling of the image (height, width, padding, etc.), specify a CSS class if you want to use a class from your stylesheet instead of the plugin settings, and specifying whether you want to use the decorative cap only on the post pages or on the front page as well.

Update September 4, 2007: Version 1.2 has been released. A minor change in the options page allows for a bit more control over where the decorative caps appear on your blog (home page, individual posts, individual pages).

Installing and using is very easy:

1. Download Decorative Caps
2. Unzip the file into your wp-content/plugins folder (this will create a directory called “scs-decorative-caps” which contains the plugin PHP page and the folder with the image files in it)
3. Activate the plugin and view the results on your site!
4. (New in version 1.1) Use the “Decorative Caps” options page in your admin interface to control the CSS styling of the image and specify some other options as well.

The image files that I used are from Leo’s Icon Archive (click on “Decorative Caps” on the left-hand side when you get there), and are freely available. If you wish to use different image files, the only specifications to work with this plugin would be:

1. Image must be square in dimension (equal width and height)
2. Image width and height must be at least 35 pixels, to avoid any degradation of the image (if you use a smaller image, make sure that you specify the correct dimensions in the options)
3. Image names must be single lower-case letters followed by “.gif” in all lower-case (i.e., “a.gif, b.gif, etc.”)

Simply replace the images in wp-content/plugins/scs-decorative-caps/images with your own image files and the result will be immediate.

Note: This plugin does some very rudimentary checking to make sure that the first character is really an alpha character. It’s by no means perfect, and I have observed the following behavior:

If the first element is the start of a tag (for example <p>), the code looks to the first character beyond that. However, if the first character is a space, or if the first character beyond the opening tag is another tag, the plugin stops trying to find an initial letter in that particular post.

I’m not precisely sure how best to figure in all the possibilites. But this should work fine for you if you generally start your post with text (or at best an opening paragraph tag). Any thoughts?