Display first image in thread on thread title mouseover. Possible?

[adamadamadam]

Hello!

Right now with vBulletin, when you mouseover a threadtitle in the thread view you get the first few sentenced displayed over your mouse. This is great for previewing the content within the thread.

How possible would it be to display the first image posted within a thread, rather than the text?

[ChopSuey]

You can try attachment thumbnails.....

To do what you want you would need to use plugins and some hook.

[mahz]

First of all, vBulletin puts the thread preview in the <a href> title attribute which doesn't support images, so this would probably have to be a javascript modification. Maybe even CSS could do it.

One thing you could do in my limited knowledge would be to:
- Create a new column in the `thread` table called 'firstimg'.
- Every time a thread is created, it can run a PHP preg_match function that scans the post message looking for the first "[img]url.extension[/img]" pattern it can find.
- If it finds one, it can store the image URL in the thread's `firstimg` column. If not, `firstimg` stays null.
- The same function can be run when a post is edited if the `firstpostid` of the thread at the post's `threadid` matches the post.
- In the threadbit template, you can then execute some javascript that displays a hovering picture box on the mouse pointer that displays the image stored in `firstimg`.

Then again, I'm new to PHP and vB and I answered this just for pseudocode practice. Given that this is what I came up with, there are probably 50 more elegant ways to do this.