The main Locally theme (canvas) has an in built slider that can be turned on or off for the front page only.
The switch for enabling the slider can be found in the easy edit customisation options for the theme.
The radio button ‘slider’ enables the slider, ‘static’ creates a single item slider useful to create a large image banner when sliding images are not appropriate, and ‘remove slider’ of course removes it.
Tick box options also displays the slider arrows (on each side) and/or slide buttons (clickable dots under the slides).
The slider works off pages or post that you have ticked to show on slider. This enables you to showcase pages or posts, if that is what you want.
The slider image is driven off the post’s featured image. To get the best proportions it it often easier to resize the image to the right dimensions outside WordPress using an image editor, although WordPress media centre has the capability to change sizes, you may find that you get unexpected results, often ‘regenerating’ thumbnails will resolve that.
The appropriate featured image sizes are
- Image only – 924 x 250 px (example of static image with multiple photos combined here , example of full image sliding here where the text is part of the image )
- Image with text on the right – 338 x 226 px
If you use ‘text only’ you will find embedded images are displayed , but great care needs to be taken to get the sizing right to avoid overflows.
Getting the style right can require a little bit of thought, and consider creating full size (924 x 250 px) images that are constructed from several images or where text is added using an image editor.
We have another feature, when using a full size image, to specify the link that the image will go to, this means that several images can point to the same content page, this is specified through the media centre
Remember a page doesn’t have to show on any navigation menu, so if you have three full width images, just create pages called Slider 1, Slider 2 & Slider 3 and set the featured image for each new page, don’t add these to any menus (or if your menus have auto-adding turned on, go and delete them from the menus)
There are some developments to the sider in the pipeline that will add addional features, such as selecting a % width for images and allowing different slide transitions such as fade-out/fade-in.