Honestly, .pdf documents are quite a PITA because your average customer will tell you that uploading a bunch of .pdf files to a web server is all it takes to create a web version of a newspaper. Plus, .pdf documents take forever to download and/or display in one’s browser, so you are not very likely to make your site visitors very happy. Still, you can at least try to present your .pdf documents in a half-decent way, with thumbnails and all. Which of course takes a lot of work, opening a .pdf and creating a thumbnail and uploading both of them to the server and inserting the thumbnail along with a link to a .pdf … and all over again for the next one.

Thanks to Andrew Rickmann of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire and his Fun With Plugins Wordpress plugin generator I created a Wordpress plugin to do the boring part. All you have to do is upload all .pdf files that belong to a particular post or page and plugin will do the rest of the job. Like this:

Or this: Welcome magazine .pdf archive. Drop-in .pdfList relies on ImageMagick to create thumbnails every time it encounters a new .pdf file and will inform admin (and admin only) of thumbnails created. You don’t have to worry about installing ImageMagick. If your web server runs on linux, ImageMagick is probably already installed.

Usage

Put [ drop_in_pdf ] shortcode, where you want your .pdf thumbnails to be.

Up to 3 thumbnails (or less, depending on number of .pdf documents associated with particular post) will be displayed. To display more than 3 thumbnails, use

[ drop_in_pdf num=x] shortcode, where x is number of thumbnail you wish to display

You can display .pdf thumbnails of another post as well, just use

[ drop_in_pdf id=x] shortcode, where x is ID of another post with .pdf ducuments

And yes: [ drop_in_pdf id=y num=x] works, too.

Download drop-in-pdflist.zip or click this beautiful icon below

I had to do it, didn’t I? Throw in .zip download thumbnail shortcode handler as well. Icon used is from Aqua Gloss Icons set found at Deziner Folio. To place automaticaly created .zip thumbnail download icon(s), put:

[ drop_in_zip] shortcode in place. To suck .zips from another post, use id shortcode parameter.

Drop-in .pdfList is not an extremely complex plugin, so there’s no need for user settings panel and admin interface. If provided inline overlaping thumbnail style and dimensions don’t suit your needs, you can still tweak user settings in drop_in_pdflist.php file. Have fun! I mean: Have fun! Or else …