Some of our themes use their own thumbnail generation in order to make sure that images fit within a theme.  There’s cropping, and a way to select an image to represent your post.

However, it was limited - you could only select an image to represent a post if it was already attached to that post.  There’s no way of having a stock-library that you can select from, and there was no preview to tell you which image you wanted.  Given the randomness of stock image filenames in particular, this presents users with a problem, takes time, and causes minor stress.

The plugin is also designed with developers in mind and provides fast, easy to use on-the-fly thumbnail and resized image creation.  Simple calls make for rapid development of beautiful, graphically rich themes.  In time we will add features to allow users to change the way their theme looks.

Over at Interconnect IT we do a lot of development for news and media organisations, and for enterprises.  As a result we’ve been developing improved tools, some of which we’ve decided to release back to the community, for free.  This is going to be our first general release plugin.  The plugin was developed by us internally, with WordPress old-timer Mike Little being involved at one stage as well.

Excited?  You should be.  Just a little bit. Now just give us a week or so and you’ll be able to play with it. And if you have any ideas for a name for this GPL work - do let us know!