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

[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.