How to Add Featured Content Slider in WordPress

Featured content slider is a slider that helps you feature your blog post and their thumbnails. Featured content slider helps blog owners to showcase or spotlight their best posts in an attractive manner with these instantly changing images. Content slider gives dynamic feel to your webpage and makes your website look alive. Adding a Featured Content Slider in your WordPress site becomes extremely easy with the help of a plugin. However finding the right plugin can be completely overwhelming due to the large number of available plugins. To make things easy for you, we have an article “5 Most Popular WordPress Slider Plugins” that can help you choose the right slider plugin. In this article we will see how to add Featured Content Slider in WordPress using a wonderful plugin called Meteor Slides.

How to Add Featured Content Slider in WordPress

Installing the Meteor Slides

Follow these steps to install the plugin

Login to your Admin Dashboard
Go to Plugins > Add New
Search for the plugin with the keyword Meteor Slides.
Install and activate the Meteor Slides plugin.

Configure Slideshow

After activation you can see a new post type slides added to the dashboard menu. Go to Slides > Settings to configure the slide show.

In the setting page you have the following settings to configure.

Slideshow Quantity

Here you can choose the number of slides that are loaded in the slideshow.

Slide Height:

Enter the height of your slides in pixels in Slide Height.

Slide Width

Enter the width of your slides in pixels in Slide Width.

Transition Style

Here you can select the effect that is used to transition between slides. There are more than 20 transitions for you to use. If you want a preview of the various transition styles, you can check jQuery effects browser.

Transition Speed

Transition Speed determines the number of seconds needed to complete a transition between slides.

Slide Duration

Here you mention the number of seconds for which each slide is paused in the slideshow.

Slideshow Navigation

You can decide whether you want a next/previous navigation or paged navigation. You can also choose to keep both navigation or none.

Adding a slide in Meteor Slides

Adding a slide is easy. Just go to Slides > Add New to create a slide.

Enter the unique title of the slide. Then set the Slide Image clicking the set featured image link. You can also add a link to the slide if you need. At the end click publish button. Try adding more than one slide to get the slideshow.

Also Read: How to Add Categories to a Custom Post Type in WordPress

Adding slideshow to your theme

You can use the template tag, shortcode, or widget to add a slideshow to any theme.

Template Tag

For adding slideshow in any custom page in your theme file, you can copy and paste the following piece of PHP code.

<?php 
if ( function_exists( 'meteor_slideshow' ) ) {
      meteor_slideshow(); 
} 
?>

Shortcode

If you want slideshow in your post or page, you can use the shortcode. Just paste the given shortcode the Post or Page editor. Do not use any code around it.

[meteor_slideshow]

Widget

You can also add slideshow to sidebar and other widgetized area

Add a Meteor slider to a sidebar or other widgetized area. Go to Appearance -> Widgets and add the Meteor Slides Widget from the Available Widgets to a sidebar.

If you use the these guide you should have a working slideshow in your website. If you want to explore more features and read further documentation of this plugin, you can check Josh Leuze website. I hope the article helped you adding a slider in your website. If you want different kinds of content sliders you check some other slider plugin like Soliloquy lite, Meta Slider, Huge-IT Slider, Cyclone Slider 2 etc.

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Kantiman Bajracharya

Kantiman Bajracharya is a freelance web developer. He is a computer geek who has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. He has earned lots of satisfied customers while working for numerous successful projects. He is also a WordPress theme creator and web article writer. On free time he likes reading philosophy books, traveling and playing chess.