Microformats2, WordPress and Featured Images Classes

In my exhuberance to post an image along with articles syndicaed from my site to Twitter, I hastily started adding the microformats2 class u-photo. I didn’t know better. It was brought to my attention that u-photo is meant for actual photo posts, where the image is the primary content. An experimental mf2 class u-featured for featured images would be more appropriate. A GitHub issue for brid.gy was added, and today, u-featured support was added to <brid.gy> for all silos.

Which brings me to WordPress. There isn’t an inherent way to add a class to a featured image when you attach it to a post from within the admin. However, I have found two different options. The first, would be to do it at the theme template level. In my case, I am now using the featured image for the image that appears above articles, and also used on the home page if in the most 3 recent articles. In my single.php template (actually template-parts/content.php but for simplicity, assume single.php) I have:

<?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
        the_post_thumbnail( 'latest-article-home' );
} ?>

where latest-article-home is the custom size. Here you can add your custom class.

 if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
        the_post_thumbnail( 'latest-article-home', array('class' => 'u-featured') );
} 

However, you may want to just add the class to all featured images in which case, you can filter wp_get_attachment_image_attributes.

function mf2_featured_image($attr) {
  remove_filter('wp_get_attachment_image_attributes','mf2_featured_image');
  $attr['class'] .= ' u-featured';
  return $attr;
}
add_filter('wp_get_attachment_image_attributes','mf2_featured_image');

Why remove the filter inside the filter? I wondered the same thing, and the author of the Stack Exchange answer where I found this looking to filter the_post_thumbnail “So that it only runs once in the particular circumstance that that you want it to run”. Made sense to me and works as expected.

I’m still curious if the bridgy-publish plugin should have this filter for users who may not fully understand the differences and why their featured image doesn’t show up with their post,but having multiple options in the short term while that is decided is good enough™ for me.