Show thumbnail for category?

I currently have a code where, in my category.php, it checks if the specific category has subcategories, and if it does, show them using wp_list_categories.

I’d love to have these wp_list_categories to show thumbnails, so I created a new walker, but I cannot figure out how to show thumbnails.

I’d be fine with having it show the featured image of my latest custom post type in this category, or using a plugin.

I currently have the following walker in my functions.php:

 class Walker_Category_Parents extends Walker_Category {



function start_el(&$output, $category, $depth, $args) {
    global $wpdb;
    extract($args);


    $link2 = ''.$category->slug.'';
    $cat_name = esc_attr( $category->name );
    $cat_name = apply_filters( 'list_cats', $cat_name, $category );
    $link = '<a href="' . esc_attr( get_term_link($category) ) . '" ';
    $link .= 'title="' . esc_attr( strip_tags( apply_filters( 'category_description', $category->description, $category ) ) ) . '"';
    $link .= 'rel="'.$category->slug.'" ';
    $link .= '>';
    $link .= $cat_name . '</a>';
    if ( 'list' == $args['style'] ) {
        $output .= "\t<li";

        $children = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT term_id FROM $wpdb->term_taxonomy WHERE parent=".$category->term_id );

        $children_count = count($children);

        $has_children = ($children_count != 0) ? ' parent-category' : '';

        $class="cat-item cat-item-" . $category->term_id . $has_children;
        if ( !empty($current_category) ) {
            $_current_category = get_term( $current_category, $category->taxonomy );
            if ( $category->term_id == $current_category )
                $class .=  ' current-cat';
            elseif ( $category->term_id == $_current_category->parent )
                $class .=  ' current-cat-parent';
        }
        $output .=  ' class="' . $class . '"';
        $output .= ">$link\n";
        $output .= "<img src="https://localhost/wp-content/themes/vom13/images/producten/";
        $output .= "$link2.png">\n";
    } else {
        $output .= "\t$link<br />\n";
    }
}




}

As you can see, it currently looks for the image in a folder, but this is absolutely not ideal, because I’m not the only one adding categories, but I don’t want to give everybody FTP access.

Any solutions?

Thanks!

There’s a great plugin called Taxonomy Images. It lets you set one image per category that you can then access in all sorts of ways.

It’s a little funky in that it uses some custom filters to return the images, but the documentation is pretty good and you should be able to figure it out.

== UPDATE ==
Here’s a quick example that gets the image based on ID (I’m assuming you’ll have the $category object that you already have in your snippet:

$images = get_option('taxonomy_image_plugin');
$cat_id = $category->term_taxonomy_id;
if( array_key_exists( $cat_id, $images ) ) {
    echo wp_get_attachment_image( $images[$cat_id] );
}

Here’s a slightly expanded version of that code on the support forums.