Genesis featured post widget tutorial

Using the Genesis featured post widget.

Some but NOT ALL StudioPress themes have widget areas in the body of the home page. Magazine Theme is a typical example.

If your StudioPress.com theme has one of these widgetized home page layouts, follow this tutorial to see how you set up the Genesis featured post widgets on the home page.

If your theme doesn’t have a widgetized area in the main page body it might have a sidebar that you can place Genesis featured post widgets in.

First, go to the StudioPress.com site and look at the demo page for your theme.

Look at the home page for your theme and see if you can spot any widgetized areas, or boxes.

Not all boxes are widget areas…

Some front page layouts are made from the Genesis Grid Loop, some layouts are made using Genesis Featured posts in Widget areas, and some are widget areas containing text or the genesis slider plugin.

Are there widget areas in your theme’s home page?

You need login to your WordPress dashboard to see what widget areas you have available in your theme. You can then decide how you want to set up any options you have available in the particular theme you’re using.

Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets.

Look for widget areas that start with the word “Home”

If a widget area is called home left, home right, home top, home bottom etc. It’ll probably appear on the front page of your site. So any content you put inside that widget area will be seen when someone views your site’s front page.

On the right hand side of the widgets page of your WordPress dashboard, you’ll see any widget areas that are available for you to use in your particular theme.

If you drag a widget into a widget area, that widget’s content will appear on your web page in that position. The names of the widget areas make it easier to understand which part of the site the content will appear on.

For-instance, if you drag the calender widget in to the Home Left widget area, a calender will appear on the left hand side of the home page of your site.

This tutorial is specifically about the Genesis Featured Post Widget. So lets start to set up a Genesis featured post widget, it’s a great way to make your site look snazzy.

Just drag the Genesis featured post widget in to a widget area

Drag the Genesis Featured Post Widget in to a widget area of your choice. And remember you can use this widget as many times as you wish, in different positions and with different settings each time.

As soon as you place the widget in a widget area, you’ll see a dialogue box with many options.

By clicking tick boxes and making selections in this dialogue box you can make images, text and links appear on your web page.

Here are some of the Genesis featured post widget’s settings, and what they do.

Let’s go through the settings one by one.

Title:

Type a new title for the widget area.

The first dialogue box in the featured post widget, is for the main widget area title. This title appears above any lists of posts. So if you have three posts listed in this featured widget area, you only see this title once above the whole block.

This is not the individual title for each individual post, that’s taken from your actual blog post.

Category:

Choose a category that the posts will be drawn from and how many posts to show from that category.

What are offsets and why would you use them?

If you want to ignore the first post in a category you can offset the first post displayed by 1.

You could have two featured post widgets appearing on the same page. The top featured post widget could display the full content of your most recent post.

Further down the page, you could have another featured post widget, displaying 3 more post excerpts from the same category. But by offsetting the second block of posts by 1, you display the most recent post in full, in the first widget area. You then have a different widget area displaying excerpts from the same category showing the second to fourth posts.

I’m assuming you’re displaying posts by date and descending order. Experiment and see what suits you.

Show Author Gravatar.

This displays the post authors Gravatar photo or icon with the post excerpt for each listed featured post.

Show Featured Image.

If you want to show a featured image for each post, select the right image size for the widget area and theme you’re using.

When showing a posts full content in a widget area, you may get a “double image problem”. If that happens, deselect the “show featured image” box.

What is a featured image?

Featured images can be used by web designers in many ways. In the Genesis featured post widget, featured images appear above or by the side of post snippets on you page.

You add featured images to your post using the dialogue box on the right hand side of your WordPress post editing screen. Featured images can also be taken from a large image you upload in to your post content.

Show post title, info, content type and more text.

Show post title: displays the title for each individual post.
Show content: shows the full post content.
Show Excerpt: shows a pre-set number of characters from the post’s content. Or the text you’ve typed into the excerpt box when writing your post.
Show Content Limit: lets you set the number of characters you want to show for each featured post. I use this to make the amount of text match up with the post thumbnail image size.
No Content: no text from the main body of your post is displayed. You can display the title but not display the content if you Wish.
More Text (if applicable): Links the excerpt to the full post. You can choose the words in the more text link.
If you select “show content” AND “show featured image”, you can get two identical images showing in the widget area. If this happens, deselect “show featured image”.

Show post title.

In the box that has show post title as the first option, I usually select “show content limit” and in the “Limit Content To” section I set a character number to suit my theme. Try different numbers of characters to see what looks best.

Show post info:

This shows things like who wrote the post and when they wrote it. You can customise this information with short codes from this web page…

http://my.studiopress.com/docs/shortcode-reference/

Unordered list and category archive link.

These two items are similar. the unordered list links to individual blog posts, the category archive link shows a blog type listing.

Display an unordered list of more posts from this category.
Show Category Archive Link.

You can display an unordered list showing more posts from this category. These are text links to older blog posts, the links appear at the bottom of the widget area.

Show Category Archive Link:

This displays a text link to a blog style listing of all posts from this one category.