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Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 12:04 am

Setting Up The WordPress Featured Content Plugin On WordPress

Setting up the featured content plugin was relatively easy.

You can download the latest plugin here featured content gallery. Install it like you would any other plugin. Next you have to add a line of code to your theme. The easiest way to do this is to go to your theme editor here in wordpress http://YOURDOMAIN/wp-admin/theme-editor.php or Appearance / editor on the menu. There are a few things to note about which file to place the code in. If it goes in the index.php or if you have one home.php it will only show on the index or home page. If it goes in the page.php it will show only on all pages. The single.php will show it only on every actual post page.

I chose to put mine in the index.php so that it would display on my main page and I wanted it near the top of the page.

At the top of the page you will find this if you look in index.php of the BlackPower 1.6 theme which we use on this site. You need to add the code in blue as it will tell the theme to use the Featured Content plugin there. I added the <div> tags just so that I could add a little padding around the slide-show. You can play with were you put it for yourself just remember to have a backup copy of the file encase something goes wrong.

<?php get_header(); ?>

<?php $i=0; while (have_posts()) : the_post(); $i++; ?>

I also added this to the style.css to give the slideshow some space around it.

#featured {padding: 10px;
}

To add posts to the slide-show I enabled a post category called Featured content and set that as the category name on the FCP setting page. To add the images you need to add a custom field to the post called articleimg. You can add test to the text overlay by adding the featuredtext custom field.

There is a good guide at featuredcontentgallery.com as to how to use the settings on the plugins wordpress settings page.

I only faced two problems to overcome while I was setting this up on this site.

Initially I couldn’t get the plugin to work.
The Post titles didn’t show in the text overlay.

To get the plugin to work I diagnosed the problem by eliminating the common areas of potential problems, theme and other plugins. I changed the theme back to the default and tried it but it still didn’t work. So I moved onto step two and started deactivating other plugins. I suspected the side bar logon because I had problems with it in the past and by deactivating that, my featured content plugin sprang to life. I was using sidebar login version 2.2.8.

The second problem was the post titles not showing on the text overlay. This one was a simple fix. I use wp-cufon here and had the <h2> tags set to take a custom font which cant be used with the featured content plugin. There were a couple of options here the easy one was to just have the wp-cufon plugin alter specific <h2> tags. So I changed the code in the wp-cufon plugin from

Cufon.replace(‘ h2,#header #logo’, { fontFamily: ‘Adventure’ }); to

Cufon.replace(‘#sidebar h2,#header #logo’, { fontFamily: ‘Adventure’ });

Another way to fix it would have been to edit the <h2> tags in the theme to something else and changed the .css and removed the h2 from wp-cufon, but that would be a lot of work and it wasn’t necessary.

NOTE: To ensure that the featured content slide-show looks good make sure that the image sizes and the slide show settings on the setting page are the same. That will stop it from going from big to small and not looking professional.

About the Author

I'm interested in collaboration, content management systems, learning php and java. I like to write on a variety of topics which take my interest. Come on over and read some more on my website at Digitalrecline.com

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