Featured Content Gallery Plugin

Featured Content Gallery is a WordPress plugin that creates an automated rotating image gallery of your posts for use anywhere within your theme. As I mentioned before I am currently working on a new affiliate site and this site uses the LifeStyle theme.

This morning I loaded the Featured Content Gallery plugin on to the home page of my new site – and it looks really cool. Pity I can’t show you a snapshot – because it is under a pen name.

Though I can’t share my site, I am going to do the next best thing – I am going to take you step by step through how to load this plugin on to your lifestyle theme. Let’s get started:

1. Go to Featured Content Gallery website and download the plugin – and then install it on to your site.
2. Go to the admin page of your wordpress blog – click ‘Settings’. At the bottom of Settings menu you should see a link to ‘Featured Content Gallery’. Click that.
3. Now we are going to configure the settings – There are only 5 things we need to change:
   • Category Name: Enter a category name. All the posts under this category will be shown in the Featured Content Gallery. I have entered ‘Featured’.

   Number of items to display: For now I have entered 3 but I later plan to change it to 5.

   • Gallery Width: This is totally up to you but I prefer ’570′.
   • Gallery Height: Again, this is totally up to you but I prefer ’300′.
   • Text Overlay: I prefer 80 – this is the text overlay on the bottom of the image in the gallery – basically the first few lines of the post.
4. You have now changed the settings – click ‘Update Options’.
5. Next go to a post you want to appear in the gallery and add the category ‘Featured’ to it – If this category does not already exist, you will have to create it.
6. Add a new custom field for that post called ‘articleimg’. Enter the url of the image you want to be shown in the gallery in the value field. Make sure this image is at least 570 *300 (otherwise it will still work but will not look that good).
7. Do the same for another post – For the plugin to work properly you need at least two posts set up (category and articleimg custom field)
8. Now go to the home page – You should see the rotating images – That’s it you are done.

I love the Featured Content Gallery Plugin on my lifestyle theme – Gives it such a professional touch.

Have you used this plugin before – Any tips/experiences you would like to share with us? Please leave a comment below…

Best,