How to Create a Slideshow Gallery in the Blog Homepage?

This method is suitable for those who want to create a slideshow gallery in your blog homepage when using Headway Premium Wordpress Theme. Together with a wordpress plugins called “Featured Content Gallery (FCG)”, it is easy to achieve the slideshow gallery you wanted.


Follow the steps to start.

1. Go to Headway Theme Visual Editor.
2. Under “Leafs”, add a “Text/HTML/PHP” Leaf in Headway Theme and size the width and height to your desired size.

Installation of Featured Content Gallery Plugin

1. Download the “Featured Content Gallery (FCG)” from here.
2. Install the FCG plugin by using FTP, alternatively you can do it via your wordpress dashboard.
3. Once FCG is installed, go to “Settings” at the left hand panel in your wordpress dashboard, change the setting according.
4. Under “ Featured Content Selection”, click on the option “Select here to use individual post or page IDs”.
5. Enter Page or Post ID number you want to feature in the slideshow gallery.
   (Note there is no space in between the number).
6. How you get the page or post ID, just go to the post or page section and hover over the post or page title, you can see the ID number below the status bar.
7. For the “Number of Items to Display”, enter 2 or more.
   (Note: FCG needs at least 2 items to work)
8. Under “Gallery Style”, enter the width and height for “Gallery Width in Pixels”, for e.g. 940 and 300.
9. For “Text Overlay Height in Pixels”, try 60. You can change it later if you want the height to be taller or shorter.
10. The rest of the setting you can leave it as default.
11. Click “Update option” to save.

Choose the Posts/Pages to Appear in FCG

1. FCG allows you to display images that are associated with your posts or pages so you must get the full URL of such images.
2. You can check the URL by clicking “Media” at the left hand panel in wordpress dashboard.
3. Click the image and copy the URL at “File URL”.
4. Go to Edit Post you want to feature and under “Custom Fields”, add “articleimg” under “Name” and paste the URL you previously copied into “Value” box.
5. Click “Add Custom Field” to add and “Update” to finish.
6. Repeat the same steps for another one or two posts you want to feature in the gallery.

Insert FCG code into Your Homepage

1. FCG needs you to insert code “<?php include (ABSPATH . '/wp-content/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php'); ?>” into your homepage (index.php) to work.
2. But in Headway Theme, you just need to insert the code into the Leaf to work.
3. Go to Headway Theme visual editor, hover over the leaf you created earlier, click on the “Pencil icon” and insert the below code instead.
<?php global $post; include (WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/plugins/featured-content-gallery/gallery.php'); ?>
4. Somehow the code given by FCG didn’t work well in Headway Premium Wordpress Theme so don’t use that code.
5. Once you inserted the code, click “Save All Changes” to save.
6. Refresh your blog homepage and you should see the slideshow gallery appear.
7. Finally, if you want to know how to position your slideshow, click here to learn.