How-To: Featured Content Gallery Plugin for WordPress

You’ve seen them on blogs and sites all over… those beautiful sliding images that feature content. Well, I’m here to show you how to get the same thing on your own WordPress powered site using the Featured Content Gallery plugin for WordPress.

While the Featured Content Gallery is an easy to use plugin, it does require a little bit of playing with to get it up and running and looking good on your site. So, let’s get started!

1.) First, download the plugin zip file here. Then either extract the contents of the folder and upload the un-zipped folder to your plugins directory via FTP, or  login to the WordPress site you wish to install the plugin on, go to Plugins, then Add New and select Upload. From here you can upload the zipped folder and WordPress will unpack and install it for you.

OR

Login to the WordPress site you wish to install the plugin on, go to Plugins, then Add New and search for Featured Content Gallery. Once you’ve found it, follow the steps to install. WordPress will guide you and it will only take a few moments.

2.) After the plugin is installed, ensure that it is activated. Then check your Settings menu in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard for Featured Content Gallery. Click on that and you’ll see a settings page.

3.) You will need to grab the portion of code provided in the second paragraph, and you’ll need to put it in the index.php or home.php file in your theme. You can do this by going to Appearance then Editor and selecting the file on the right. Once it’s loaded, look for something like this: <div id=”content”>

You’ll want to paste the code in after that, but before the code that calls the posts so your slider will be at the top. You may need to play with this a bit, depending on your theme and how it’s coded.

Once you have the line of code in, save the file, then view your site to see if anything was added. It may be a tiny square or line at first, but you should notice something.

4.) Then you can go back to the Featured Content Gallery settings page. Start by putting some values in the size boxes, saving, (Update Options button at the bottom of the page) and checking the site until you have the size correct. When it is, decide on colors. For a site with a white background I like to make the border and background of the slider white, and the text black. You can either specify the color using a basic color name like Black or White, or you can use color numbers such as #000000 or #ffffff to specify exact colors to match your theme.

Choose a category to have shown in the slider. I usually set up a category called Featured and I tag all the posts I want to show in the slider with the Featured category. You can specify how many posts you want to show in the slider and it will automatically pull the most recent posts from that category.

If you want, you can play with the settings for how long the slider waits between showing new posts, how long it takes to slide, how many words show in the text area, etc. You can also change how the sliders functions under Slide Transition Type.

5.) Now that you have it all set up, you need to work on a few of your posts to get them to show in the slider. Make sure they’re in the category you chose for the slider to show, then go to the Custom Fields part of the editor and enter articleimg in the left side and the url of the image you want to show in the slider on the right. Update. Once you’ve done this for one post, you’ll be able to select articleimg from the dropdown for future posts and you’ll just have to add the image url.

You must have at least two posts in the featured category in order for the gallery to function.

There are other settings and customizations you can use and you can find the settings on the Featured Content Gallery settings page. Just follow the above instructions to add items to the Custom Field section of the post editor if you choose to use them.

Have Fun!! And, if you have questions, Contact Me!!