Surely you have some articles that you want to highlight for the readers of your website or blog. That is, you want to create some outstanding publications or a prominent content. And if you have your website or blog hosted in WordPress, it is possible not only to do this, but to show it in the form of a slider, and those different slides with these featured articles will automatically go through. It is an excellent way for certain entries not to be lost in time or so that the new ones have a prominent place on your homepage.
In the past we showed how to fix a featured article in the home of our WordPress. But, sometimes, only one entry may seem insufficient. And for that, the use of the slider is ideal, since in a minimum space, we can show a lot of information to our visitors. It is ideal not to reload our website with too much information at the same time.
Installing the Jetpack plugin
In order to add this slider to our website, first of all what we should do is install one of the most used and known WordPress plugins: Jetpack. If you have any questions about how to install a plugin in WordPress, here we have an article that can solve all your doubts about it.
As we say, Jetpack is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. And it is not for less, since it gathers in a same extension multitude of functionalities according to the modules that we activate. These range from tools for SEO, creation of forms to statistics of your web. Without going any further, some time ago we spoke at Silo Creativo of two of the jetpack’s modules: Appearance and Image.
Once we have Jetpack installed and activated on our website, we will go directly to the next step of this mini-tutorial: choosing our featured posts to be displayed on the front page of the website.
Creating the Slider with Featured Content
First, from the WordPress dashboard, we will enter the Personalization section. If we have Jetpack correctly installed and activated, we can see how a new section called Featured Content appears. We enter it, and we see what our options are.
First, we see a text field titled Name of the tag. This gives us a clue about how our Featured Content slider will work. What we are going to do is create a new Label on our website, and all those items that carry that label will automatically appear on the cover slider. So, let’s write a name that is remarkable enough to remember between the clouds of Tags that we have on our website. We can use the word we want. In my case, I will choose the highlighted word. Easy and direct.
If we continue to observe, just below the text field that we have filled in, we have two more options below. If we activate the first one, the Label will not be displayed for our visitors. Neither in the list of labels of the articles nor in the tag cloud, if we have one on our website. This is because this new label may be used for internal use. Just so that, as web administrators, we know that certain articles are Featured Content, and we do not want to see that they have an extra Tag. If it is our case, we will activate this first checkbox.
The second option is for the Featured Content to be shown both in the slider we want to create, and in the timeline of articles on our website. If we want them to be shown in both sites, we will activate this box. If on the contrary we only want the featured articles to be seen in the slider but not appear together with the rest of the articles, we will keep it deactivated.
Creating and Assigning the New Label
We have already told Jetpack what will be the label that will work to create our Featured Content slider. But we have missed an important step: creating the Label itself. It is an extremely simple process, as we all know. You just have to go, from the WordPress Administration Panel, to Entries> Tags. And here, we will create a new Label that is exactly the same word that we have previously added in the Featured Content section, within Customize.
And once this is done, we just have to go to our list of entries and go assigning this new label to those we want to be part of the Featured Content slider. It is as simple as that.
We just have to go to the front page of our website and see how the slider with the Featured Content we have chosen already appears. As you can see, it is not an extremely complicated process. But in spite of this, we do not want to end without commenting on a final issue that surely many may interest.
Some common problems
By incorporating this feature into some of our WordPress themes such as Rosalie, sometimes we encounter some users who have doubts or problems. Since, despite being a relatively simple process, the slightest mistake results in the slider not appear on our homepage.
One of the most common problems comes when adding the label with quotes. This is due to the fact that in certain tutorials, even in some old ones offered by the Jetpack documentation, it appeared that we had to insert a “featured tag.” So it is quite usual that many, at first (I include myself in those who did it) directly made a copy & paste, quotes included, causing that we did not relate this label with the one we added to our entries so the slider never appeared.
It is also quite usual that we do not see the slider with the highlighted content if we are using a static page as the home page. To change this, just go to the Customization panel, and enter the Cover Settings section. Here, you simply have to verify that the option of Your last entries is active, as we see in the image.
And that’s all. As you have seen, it is a very easy option to activate and add to our website, with which we gain enough dynamism in our design, in addition to accenting certain entries on our website, which might otherwise be relegated to the background when adding new content.
We hope this mini-tutorial has served you well. If you have any questions just write us in the comments!
