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JavaScript

Nathan F.
Nathan F.
30,773 Points
Posted by Nathan F.
Nathan F.
30,773 Points

Wordpress Featured Content, slider woes

Hopefully this will be my last Wordpress post for a while, until I can sit back, relax, and get my hands dirty by fiddling with it on my own. But for now, I must consult the wisdom of the Wordpress gurus here.

This is for a friend, who gave me a mockup because she had no idea how to add a jQuery slider to her Wordpress-powered site. It's a pretty simple design--a big custom banner, a nav bar below it, a slider with featured posts below that, and a blog underneath. I thought it'd be painlessly simple, but it's been anything but. What I need is a slider that will fetch content tagged as featured, or a similar setup, and use the featured image in the slider, along with a title and maybe an excerpt.

I thought I found my answer in Jetpack's "Featured Content," which seems to power several themes like Superhero, combined with Flexslider. So I decided to give this a test drive, and then go about supporting Featured Content in my child theme. But here I run into a wall: in a theme that supports Featured Content, I should be able to go into Settings -> Reading and set a tag, and all the content with that tag will be pulled into the slider.

Even with a supporting theme (like Superhero) and Jetpack 2.2.5 installed, I have no such option. I've searched high and low, and the one thing I did manage to glean is that self-hosted blogs need to install Jetpack, but Wordpress.com blogs do not. Only, I do have Jetpack installed, and still nothing.

So, all that long-winded babbling boils down to two questions I have for you wise Wordpress masters: 1 ) How can I enable and set Jetpack Featured Content on a Wordpress.org install? Or what might be going wrong that I'm not seeing settings I should be able to?

2 ) Failing that, how else might I implement a slider for my needs? I've been picking apart Wordpress documentation in search of an answer, and I figure the key lies within The Loop. I'm just not quite sure how all the pieces fit together to insert them into a slider.

7 Answers

Martin Rheaume
Martin Rheaume
4,831 Points
Martin Rheaume
Martin Rheaume
4,831 Points

I would forget about jetpack, and check out some other free image slider plugin options. Most of the best ones should have a way to grab featured content or categories. Maybe one of these would work for you 'https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&ie=UTF-8

Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points
Matt Campbell
Matt Campbell
9,767 Points

Watch the video relating to this in making a Wordpress theme. Think you should be able to use wp_query to get featured images or give them a custom class of featured image. I'm doing something similar with 4 post categories, a column for each category, and the videos on here are perfect for it.

Nathan F.
Nathan F.
30,773 Points
Nathan F.
Nathan F.
30,773 Points

Hi folks! Thanks for the responses.

Martin Rheaume , for some reason your link didn't work. It just tosses me to Google.

Matthew Campbell , I think I'll do that. I was trying to not get ahead of myself when it came to the Wordpress lessons, but it seems I've already done as much by biting off a little more than I can chew, project wise. :D As I said, I do think I should be able to do what I want to do by mastering Wordpress queries.

John Locke , as for the first link, I don't think so. "Featured Content" is supposed to be a semi-hidden feature of Jetpack since 2.2.2. It seems a bit like sticky posts, and certain themes use it to grab content for their sliders.

Some of those other links, however, look pretty promising!

The biggest frustration I've had with some of the slider plugins I've looked at in the Wordpress directory is most I've found seem to be unsupported or otherwise not up-to-date. Others work alright--but require you to upload slide images, then paste in a URL to link to, and possibly a title. Those work fine for marketing sites, but it would be tedious for an events blog that is likely to be updated weekly. For that reason, I wanted something that's essentially "set-it-and-forget-it": just grab the latest 5 blog posts that have been tagged as a feature.

Martin Rheaume
Martin Rheaume
4,831 Points
Martin Rheaume
Martin Rheaume
4,831 Points

Sorry, I don't know what happened there, http://blogspiceup.com/1121/9-best-free-featured-post-slider-plugins-for-wordpress/

Zac Gordon
STAFF
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher
Zac Gordon
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher

This is my favorite slideshow plugin: <a href="http://www.woothemes.com/products/wooslider/">WooSlider</a>. This is what we will use in the final <a href="http://teamtreehouse.com/library/websites/how-to-build-a-wordpress-theme">How to Build a WordPress Theme</a> project, but those last videos won't be out for a while :-/

Matthew Dilello
Matthew Dilello
6,203 Points
Matthew Dilello
Matthew Dilello
6,203 Points

Check out Soliloquy, I have been using it to add sliders and find it pretty good. I will be interested in seeing how WooSlider compares. I like Soliloquy, but I have not needed to do what you want to do with the auto pulling from featured images. I use the Lite version but the Pro is reasonably priced and there is an Addon for Featured Content that might help out with the automation you are looking for.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/soliloquy-lite/ http://soliloquywp.com/addons/featured-content/