Staff Page as a Front Page

[Marcel Lorrain]

Hello,

Is there a way to have a specific staff member as the Front Page when you get on the site?

I am doing an Artist page and I would like the artist to be the first thing people see when they get to the staff.

Thank you.

[Bill Robbins]

Great question. If understand what you’re going for here, you’d like to use the listing image and details, but just for one artist and include that on your font page, correct?

Here’s how I would go about doing that.

1. Create your staff member first. The artist.
2. While you’re creating them, look in the right hand column for a box labeled staff group. Create a new staff group just for this artist. Then publish/update your staff member.
3. Next go to the pages section in your WordPress control panel and create a new page.
4. In the content for the page, place this:

   
   [staff group="core"]
   

   and replace the core with the “slug” for the staff group you created for your artist. You can find that by clicking on staff groups in the staff section. The slugs will be listed in the top right of that screen.

5. Enter any other content you’d like to have along with the staff member on the front page and then publish this page.
6. Next go to the Widget section. Find the section of the home page where you’d like to have the staff member displayed. Drag a “Home Block — Page Content” widget into that sidebar area. Choose the page you just published for the content there and save the widget.

That should get your staff member on the front page along with some additional content. It may need a bit of style tweaking to get that to fit perfectly. If you’ll send over the URL to your site after you get that set up, I’ll be glad to take a look and send over a bit of styling that to smooth it out.

If you have any trouble, let me know.

Thanks,
Bill

[Marcel Lorrain]

This is along the lines of what I wanted but what I would like my front page to look like would be;

http://test.shannasteals.ca/en/?staff=shanna-steals

it that is at all possible.

[Bill Robbins]

There’s almost always a way to make something happen if you want to. Here are two options that came to mind here.

Redirect

The easiest option would be redirect the home page to her staff page. You could use a plugin like Safe Redirect Manager. That plugin allows you to create a redirection that would take visitors from the site’s home page immediately to her staff page. It would be seamless to them. The only drawback would be when someone types in the URL to your home page, they will ultimately end up at a different URL. People could still type in your home page, but they would ultimately end up on a sub-page by doing so.

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New Page Template

The next option would be to create a new page template. That would give you the layout you’re looking for also on the home page URL directly (no redirect).

If you’re familiar with FTP, then use it to browse to the wp-content/themes/elite folder on your server and create a new file there called special-staff-page.php and paste this into it:

Be sure to copy that from the support site and not the email notification

If you’re not a FTP user, we can still do this. You’ll need to install a plugin called WP Editor. It will change out the built-in WordPress theme editor (it’s in the Appearance section) for an improved one.

Copy the code above and use a plain text editor like Notepad to create a new file on your computer. Call it special-staff-page.php and paste the contents above into the file. Then save it.

Then install and activate the WP Editor plugin and go to the Appearance section and select Theme Editor. There is an option there to upload a file. Choose the special-staff-page.php file you created and upload it to your theme.

Now you should have a new page template that will show your staff member. Just set that template to be on your home page and you’re good to go.

The template will always show the first staff member in the order that’s set in WordPress. If you add more staff later on, make sure to keep her set to number 1 in the order box with everyone else having a lower number.

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If you have any questions or trouble with either option, just let me know.

Thanks,
Bill

[Marcel Lorrain]

Wow! That worked! Thank you very much!

[Bill Robbins]

Anytime. Have a great weekend and let me know if you have any other questions.

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