Inserting slider in home page

[John Renock]

Bill,

I have been doing web pages for a while and decided switching to WP would make it easier for my successors at the church to pick up and carry on and I can retire.

How do I install a slider on the home page? I am using Authentic Theme and finally figured out how to locate the home page and get it on the menu.

Looking at Customize themes I see the home page and where the slider should go, but am lost as to how to put in the images and install it on the home page.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

John

[Bill Robbins]

John,

Great question. There is a quick screencast in our video section (I’ve also embedded it below) that walks through adding slides to the slideshow. Basically, here’s what you do:

1. Go to the Media section of your WordPress control panel and select Slides.
2. At the top, next to where it says “slides” click “Add New.”
3. Adding a slide is basically like adding a post. The slide image is the “featured image” of that slide. You can also set the order of the slides using the order box in the right hand column when you’re editing a slide.

   You also can do things like schedule a slide to publish at a certain time. That makes it easy to have new slides appear, even when you’re on vacation. That can be done by setting the publish date/time to a point in the future.

4. Once your finished, publish your slide.

That’s essentially it. The video below is made using the Progress theme, but the method is the same.

If you haven’t downloaded the most recent version of Authentic, I’d suggest getting it (it was released last Wednesday).

Let me know if you have any questions,
Bill

[John Renock]

Bill,

Thank you! That worked!! Now I notice another problem…in my angst to create a home page I made a page called Welcome and the slides are attached to that page or post. Should I delete the images and start over?

Thanks again.
John

[Bill Robbins]

John,

You’re correct, you’ll want to remove the page. You can still assign the images to slides via your media gallery so at least you don’t have to delete those.

Let me know if you have any trouble,
Bill

[John Renock]

Bill,

Moving right along…problem solved, thank you. Now…

Would like to put a Welcome text under the slides, tried making a post, but couldn’t get it there.

Also, do I have to go into the code to change the font on the text title on the home page?

The tag line is not showing, too.

Heck, I thought going from stick shift (Dreamweaver etc.) to automatic (Word Press) would be easy. I am however learning, thank you,

John

[Bill Robbins]

John,

Great question. The home page is made up entirely of widgets. We set it up that way because it allows for the greatest variety of content to be placed there.

To add the widgets, go to the appearance section and select widgets. There are two widget areas or “sidebars” for the home page. The home top is the area next to the slideshow and the home bottom is for the section below that.

The best way to add in some welcome text there would be to use a text widget. It can take any text or HTML (your Dreamweaver skills are not lost).

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For changing the fonts, I recommend a plugin called Fontific. It lets you visually edit your typography and also include Google’s web fonts. Essentially once you have the plugin activated, it will add a new menu in the Appearance section. There you can add rules to target specific elements. You enter the text you’d like to change in the top left and then make the changes.

To change the text title, you’d use these selectors:

#text-logo h1, 
#text-logo p

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If you run into any trouble, let me know,
Bill

[John Renock]

Bill,
Your patience is appreciated.

Three things:

1. I am not sure what you mean about entering the text to change in the top left….where specifically and where to put the code #text-logo h1.

2. The tag line is not showing above the slides.

3. Podcast widget is working fine. How do I put the audio files on the Podcasts archive page that I made?

Thanks for walking me through this.

John

[Bill Robbins]

John,

My apologies for not being clearer. Let me see if I can help you out:

After you activate Fontific, there will be a new menu item under the Appearance section of your WordPress control panel called “Fonts.” When you go there it will look like this:

Click where it says “New Font Rule” and you’ll then end up with something that looks like this:

In the top left corner of the box that’s now visible, click where it says “Enter Selector Here” and then paste this:

#text-logo h1, 
#text-logo p

Which will give you something that looks like this:

Then adjust the text like you’d like to and click “Save All Changes.” That will change you text logo.

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The only place Authentic uses the tagline is part of the page title tag on the home page. It’s not visibly displayed.

If you’d like to add it below you logo, you can do that. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

1. Go to the appearance section and select edit to open up the theme editor.
2. From the list of files on your right, choose header.php.
3. Look for this spot:

   
   <nav>
   		<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'primary', 'container' => false, 'fallback_cb' => 'wp_page_menu' ) ); ?>
   		
   	</nav><!-- Close Navigation -->
   

   and paste this right above it:

4. Save your changes.

That will add in your tagline.

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To add a podcast file, go to the Podcast section and either edit an existing podcast or create a new one. I’m not certain which version of the theme you’re running and this is one spot that has changed. If you’re using a version below 1.2, it will this is where you’ll go. In the top right hand corner, you’ll see a box labeled “Podcast Media” that looks like this:

If you click “Add Media” you can upload your message file or your notes file if you have one.

If you’re using version 1.2 or higher, there will be a box labeled “Podcast Files” below your main content box. You can click Upload file to add your audio/notes files there. It will look like this:

If your web host doesn’t allow you to upload files that are quite large (some hosts place caps at 8 or 20 mb), you can upload via FTP to your server and enter the URL to the file directly here too. Once you’re finished, just click update/publish and that will add the file

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If you run into any trouble, just let me know.

Thanks,
Bill

[John Renock]

Bill,
Been away for a few days. Everything is working great so far. I have a few little things I will try to work out, but the biggest problem is trying to insert a gallery. I watched the video and everything was fine until it was time to “insert gallery” No such link appeared. I started a new thread for this but somehow it was missed. See Gallery Setup galionfirstlutheran.org/newsite
Thanks for all your help. Really appreciated.

John

[Bill Robbins]

John,

Let’s see if we can find your missing link. Typically the way this works is you go to a page or post (they also can be added to staff members and podcasts to if you’d like to).

Click the upload/insert button just above the main content area. Upload all the images you’d like to have in the gallery there. Once they have finished uploading, click “Save all Changes” at the bottom of the pop-up.

The pop-up will then refresh and you’ll have a new button at the bottom for “Insert Gallery”

If you add images via Media > Add New, then they aren’t included in the gallery on a page or post.

You can also add a gallery directly to a page/post by entering what’s called a “shortcode” where you’d like the gallery to be. Just use this:

and WordPress will make a gallery of all images uploaded on that page/post.

If you have any trouble, let me know,
Bill

[John Renock]

Bill,

Got it!! Thank you! The problem was I was loading from the media file. The short code will help in the future. Now that I know how to do it on a page, I can see where a post would be better for this type event.
What can I do to set up a page that would be a collection of the posts with links to them? Is that done with tags and/or categories?

Thank you so much….I think I am getting it! 🙂

John

[Bill Robbins]

You’re getting it!

The best way to add a list of posts is to add the category that all those posts are assigned to, to your navigation menu. WordPress and the theme will automatically create a list of all those posts for you. It will also update dynamically as more posts are added to that category.

If you have any questions, just let me know,
Bill

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