Movable Type 4: How can I show the last asset?

Question

I know i can use

  <mt:EntryAssets lastn="1">      
       <img src="<$mt:AssetThumbnailURL width="100"$>" />
  </mt:EntryAssets>

to show the 'last' asset...how do I show the 'first' or 'oldest' assest?

Answer 1

[I'll point out here that "first" and "oldest" are not necessarily the same question.
You'll see why this is important below. Given the snippet you used, I'm going to assume what you're asking for is first as in position within the entry content. Sorry for length, but this is one of my pet bugs.]

Technically, you can't. That bug(summarized further down if you don't have an Fbz account) has finally been attached to a milestone, so hopefully this won't always be the case.

Practically, reversing the sort order will usually probably output what you expect:

<mt:entryassets limit="1" sort_order="ascend">

...as long as you compose your entries top-to-bottom, and don't later mess with the assets much

The underlying problem is that the current EntryAssets implementation doesn't actually take your content into account. It just loads a list of associated assets and then sorts them by the created_on dates of the assets themselves, not what physical order they appear in or even when they were attached to that particular entry. So as an extreme example, if you insert five images into a post, my snippet above will return the first image, as expected. If you later reverse their order and save, it'll still output that same image, which is now the (ordinal) last one. So, back to what I said at top, you're thinking "first" and MT is always giving you "oldest." And this requires an even further assumption that you're always uploading the assets at time of composition. If one of them was already in the system from say, two years ago, it's going to get returned because it's just older than everything else.

If you're using MT4.3x with the Entry Asset Manager in the sidebar of the composition screen and use it to attach(rather than insert) assets, this is going to get even more complicated, because there's no way to distinguish between assets that were associated with the entry via each manner.

So.
If you absolutely need the returned asset to be predictable, you'll need to actually distinguish it from the group in some way. There's this suggestion to tag the asset with "@first" or something similar. It's not great, but you'll at least know what you're getting(assuming you only tag one asset per entry as such). If you've got custom fields available, you might see if it makes more sense to create a separate "featured/thumbnail image" asset field that it would go into so that you could explicitly test for it. It'll ultimately depend some upon why you're wanting to extract this particular asset.