Hi everyone, I’m running into a baffling issue while building a custom post ticker shortcode.

My WP_Query successfully fetches the latest posts and grabs their titles and permalinks perfectly. However, has_post_thumbnail() is returning false for every single post in the loop, forcing my code to output my text fallback instead of the images.

I know for a fact that all the post have feature images

Here is my code (running via Code Snippets plugin):

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', function() {

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

add_image_size( 'blog-card', 600, 400, true );

} );

add_shortcode('custom_post_ticker', 'build_smooth_ticker'); 1

function build_smooth_ticker() {

$query = new WP_Query(array(

'post_type' => 'post',

'posts_per_page' => 10,

'post_status' => 'publish'

));

if (!$query->have_posts()) return '';

$items = '';

while ($query->have_posts()) {

$query->the_post();

$current_id = get_the_ID();

// TEMPORARY DEBUG LINE

$items .= '<!-- ID: ' . $current_id . ' | Has thumb: ' . (has_post_thumbnail($current_id) ? 'YES' : 'NO') . ' -->';

if (has_post_thumbnail($current_id)) { $content = get_the_post_thumbnail($current_id, 'blog-card'); } else {

// This fallback always triggers

$content = '<div style="color: white; font-weight: bold; padding: 0 20px; line-height: 180px;">' . get_the_title() . '</div>'; }

$items .= '<div class="ticker-item"><a href="' . get\_permalink() . '">' . $content . '</a></div>';

}

wp_reset_postdata();

return '<div class="ticker-wrap"><div class="ticker-track">' . $items . $items . '</div></div>'; }