How to set up the home page slider

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Since releasing this theme we have had some requests for a tutorial on how to set up the home page as on this demo site. Here is a simple step by step which I hope will help those unfamiliar with WordPress through the process…

By default the theme installs with a traditional blog style layout on the home page, but it is quite easy to change this. Here’s how to apply the alternative home page templates:

  1. Login to WP and create a new static page (call it “Home” or something similar), and in the right hand column of the page edit interface you will see an option to select from a drop down list of templates. Select the template you want to apply to the page. These templates are only available to be applied to static pages (not posts). You can choose from the static page template with sliding images and widgets, the latest posts slider with widgets, or the latest posts and plain content template. If you choose the options with the widgets (as in the demo home page) then you can edit the content of the widgets under Appearance > Widgets.
  2. Create another static page called Blog. You don’t need to select any templates or add any content to this, it is just a page that will be assigned as the new blog page.
  3. Once these two pages are created, go to Settings > Reading where you can choose to set a static page as the home page, and another static page to be your blog page. Make these changes and save the updated settings. Now your “Home” page will appear as the sites home and the “Blog” page will be where any posts you write appear. You don’t have to have a blog, but this is where the posts go if you do write them.

A couple of additional notes about images…

  • If you choose the home page template which uses static page content then you must embed a regular WordPress gallery of images in the homepage content and the template will use these in the slider. How good your images look will depend alot on the quality of the images you upload. Crop your images to 1000 x 640 and they’ll work well.
  • If you choose either of the home page templates which slide the latest posts then the images will be the images you set as “featured” for each of those posts. The featured image for each post is also what is used on the blog page itself.

This demo site was set up with a completely standard install of WordPress and it is entirely possible to replicate the layout of all pages with the stock theme install.

Hope this helps 🙂