WordPress – How to setup a

featured content gallery

For many a featured gallery is perfect for their self-hosted WordPress website front page.

It enables the visitors to see ‘featured’ content being cycled through.

A featured gallery can add a much needed splash of colour to a website – however also a featured gallery might be a distraction that isn’t required. It all depends on your website theme, content and your objectives.

If you want to hire a website designer, please contact Neogain.

If you do decide you want to install a featured content gallery, then ‘featured content gallery’, aka FCG is suitable for most.

Once setup it will rotate through pages, posts or a chosen category.

It is high configurable, but luckily doesn’t require much skill to setup.

How to upload and activate the ‘Featured Content Gallery’ plugin:

1. Download the zip file from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/featured-content-gallery/

2. Uncompress the zip file and upload the folder, sub-folders and files to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.

3. Active the plugin via the WordPress dashboard as an administrator.

How to insert the ‘Featured Content Gallery’ code:

1. Log into the WordPress dashboard as administrator.

2. From the ‘Appearance’ section please select ‘Editor’.

3. The file probably best to place the code is the (Main Index Template) index.php, file.

The code to insert is: <?php include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>

Example of code inserted into the index.php file:

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id=”content” class=”narrowcolumn”>

<?php include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php’); ?>

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Configuring the gallery.

Configuring the gallery is straightforward and the configuration is selectable from the ‘Settings’ menu. Most the ‘default’ settings are fine.

Make sure the height and width of the gallery is suitable for your website, before creating your images. Otherwise it will eat up your time later on. i.e. recreating images to new sizes.

How to select a page or post and assign an image:

If are specifying specific pages or posts, you need to know their id number.

All you have to do is go to the ‘pages’ or ‘posts’, place the mouse over a title and at the bottom of your browse the id number should be displayed as part of a path.

Then in the individual page or post you assign a custom field called articleimg with the path to the image as the value.

Conclusion

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