Nach einer Kanne Kaffee und einigen Zigaretten mache ich jetzt erstmal Pause.
Schon viel erledigt heute!
- Das neue Addon “Cover Photo Add-On for Friendica” eingebaut.
- alle Server mit updates versorgt und einige kleine Fehler behoben
- und etwas mit der KI gespielt und einige Bilder erstellt
♲ Random Penguin (randompenguin@dillyofapickle.com)2025-08-29 21:53:26:
Cover Photo Add-On for Friendica
I got a little sidetracked from working on a new theme and ended up making this add-on that finally creates a user interface for setting/changing/showing Friendica’s built-in profile Cover Photo. Every other social media platform out there shows these, it’s about time Friendica did too. I’m looking for any server admins who want to test this on a live server.
Okay, you might know them as a “Header Image” (Mastodon, Tumblr), “Banner” (Bluesky), or “Cover Photo” (Facebook). I’m sticking with “Cover Photo” because that’s what I called it in my Bookface scheme for Frio, and because the words “header” and “banner” are used in Friendica’s code to refer to half a dozen different things. For example the back-end functions are things like “uploadBanner” and “getDefaultBanner” but the data is stored in the profile’s “header” key because the “banner” key is for something else. So “Cover Photo” it is!
Until now the only way to set/change/see this image in Friendica was if you were using one of the third-party mobile apps that supports Friendica it could be (somewhat) managed through the API. But there was no interface for doing it through the Friendica website/webapp and none of the available themes would show it. I’ve been working on a new theme for Friendica that would support showing it and ended up making this add-on to show it in every theme.
I have tested this in both the 2024.12 stable release and the 2025.07 release candidate. So far as I can tell it works equally well in either of them. This is how it shows the “Cover Photo” on the profile in all of the main themes:
It will also show the image across ALL the top of the Profile sub-pages
* /profile/username/
* /profile/username/profile
* /profile/username/conversations
* /profile/username/photos (but none of the photo sub-pages)
* /profile/username/media
* /profile/username/calendar
* /profile/username/notes
* /profile/username/schedule
* /profile/username/contacts (and all sub-pages)
* /contact/00 (where “00” is the contact ID number)
* /contact/00/conversations
* /contact/00/posts
* /contact/00/media
* /contact/00/contacts (and all sub-pages)You can paste a public image URL into the box if you’re pulling it from elsewhere or you can browse for an image in your Photos library. Either way Friendica makes a copy and puts it in a “Banner Photos” album. On submission the add-on will check whether it is a local image or not, and if it is local it will check the permissions and warn you if you selected a non-public image.
You will likely also want to go into your Friendica Settings > Account > Security and Privacy and tick the box for “Make all posted pictures accessible”. Other platforms don’t know how to handle Friendica’s photo permissions. What this does is make sure if you posted a publicly accessible image that it is actually publicly accessible to other platforms.
On my development server I have my stable and RC Friendica installs connected to a WordPress install sharing over ActivityPub. In my testing it successfully shows the Cover Photos for the ActivityPub users. I’m assuming it will show “Header Images” from Mastodon as well but I have not been able to test this. I’m also not sure if you set a Cover Photo with this add-on whether or not it propagates to other platforms.
I included translations for a dozen languages, but these are AI translations so I can’t say if they’re nonsense or not. I only know English.
Oh, and another important thing is it won’t show you any Cover Photos for anyone, including yourself, if you don’t at the very least tick the “Enable Cover Photos on Profiles” checkbox in the add-on!
Lastly, if you already set up a Cover Photo using the
[class=coverphoto]…[/class]method in Bookface you can also use the add-on, but on some Profile pages your BBcoded one will override the Friendica-native one. You could also set them to the same image and nobody would notice.@Friendica Admins @Friendica Developers
DOWNLOAD FROM GITLAB
https://gitlab.com/randompenguin/coverphoto/-/releases/1.0
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