Featured Articles is a WordPress slider plugin that allows you to create sliders in your blog pages directly from your already written content, be it posts or pages.
For a quick tutorial see How to create a WordPress slider with Featured Articles.
Coming with multiple, configurable WordPress slider themes and the possibility to extend it with new themes and slider scripts, Featured Articles is the best WordPress slider plugin available.
Lite version features:
- Responsive and mobile ready;
- Allows you to create sliders based on Nivo slider by implementing a slider theme compatible with Nivo slider;
- Post and page sliders;
- Navigation arrows and pagination;
- Multiple slider themes;
- Third party slider scripts implementation;
- Preloading functionality on page load;
- Lots of actions and filters for customizing output and functionality;
- SEO friendly;
- Packed with layout and animation options;
- Various slider publishing methods: shortcodes, widgets, automatic placement, PHP code that can be used in templates.
- … and more.
With the ability to change any slider aspect by making use of slider themes that are delivered with the plugin, almost anything is possible.
Also, it offers the possibility to create additional themes (with some PHP, CSS and JavaScript knowledge) that can have custom written animations by extending the base functionality of the main slider script.
Please note that the video presents PRO features not available in Lite version.
https://vimeo.com/113921051
Sliders can be published in WordPress by any of these ways (or all at the same time):
- manual placement directly into your WordPress theme template files (requires editing the template file you want to place a slider in and add a small piece of code);
- shortcode placement directly into a post or page content;
- widget placement into any widget areas your theme has;
- automatic placement in any page just above the page loop.
While Lite version of Featured Articles provides all the neccessary tools for creating a beautiful WordPress slider, PRO version comes in addition with:
- more slider themes, all video enabled and responsive;
- video enabled custom slides for YouTube and Vimeo that can embed videos in your WordPress sliders;
- custom slides that can be created using the visual editor;
- sliders can be created from any post type (including custom post type) registered on your WordPress website;
- for posts and custom post types, selection of posts by taxonomies;
- mixing of posts, custom posts, pages and custom slides into the same slider;
- visual color scheme editor that allows you to blend-in slideshows into your overall blog design without having to write a single line of CSS;
- priority support and debugging for 3’rd party plugins and themes conflicts;
- cached sliders for faster page loading time;
- possibility to attach videos to any slide (post, custom post, page or custom slide);
- possibility to import video title, description and image as slide title, content and slide image or featured image;
- dynamic slider areas management that allow slider publishing in your WordPress website by simple drag and drop;
- sliders created from WordPress Gallery images;
- and more…
Important links:
These are just a few of the things this plugin can do so just go on and try it for yourself!
The plugin can be used to display your fresh content on your homepage, display related posts on single post pages, put special offers into sliders to create attention and any other way you see fit.
Troubleshooting
Plugin is guaranteed to work on a clean WordPress install. Since themes and other plugins don’t always play nice, there are a few things you could check if sliders won’t work in your pages:
- Check that only one jquery file is loaded. Most times, a manually loaded jQuery version in theme header or by a plugin may be the cause. Look in your page source in browser and see if that’s the problem.
- Plugins merging JavaScript and CSS files may also cause problems. In this case, it’s all about god intentions with bad results.
- Use the proper WordPress version (4 +).
- See if your theme footer.php file calls wp_footer().
If all options are exhausted, you can always ask for help on our forums at CodeFlavors Featured Articles WP forum. We’ll help you figure out things.