We’ve just finished up some updates to the “featurettes” (the three large colorful panels that can show on your site’s landing page to feature content). Specifically there are two new enhancements that we hope will make featuring content easier and more intuitive.

Enhancement #1 – optional start/end dates

You can set a “start” date for the featurette, a date that you’d like the featurette to begin displaying. If you set this, the featurette will not show until the date you picked, and will automatically show up beginning on the date you selected. Leave this blank for the featurette to just show up as usual.

You can set an “end” date; this is a date that you’d like the featurette to automatically stop displaying. 
In both cases, the dates are inclusive; in other words, the featurette will show up on the selected date.
You don’t need to use both dates, you can use neither (for the current behavior of just display all the time), one of them, or both. Hopefully these two date fields will make it just a bit easier to schedule and manage the content on your landing page. 

Enhancement #2 – use any content in the featurette area

Sometimes it’s a bit cumbersome to create a “featurette” just to link to an event you’ve created or another page on your site. Now you can display a post, page, or event itself in the featurette area and skip the in-between step. 

In order to do this:

1. open the page/post/event for editing
2. click the three-dot menu in the far upper right (to the right of the gear icon)
3. In the list that displays, click “Feature this item”. That will open a side panel with a checkbox.
4. Check the box to tell WordPress to display the current home on your landing page. 
5. To get back to the normal side panel, click the gear icon at the top.

There are a few caveats with this to be aware of:

1. You can’t use the start/end dates as described above with page/post/events. Instead, you have to manually check the box to feature and manually uncheck the box to stop featuring. 
2. The three items on the landing page are sorted by first-published date. In some cases, you may have a page which was published many years ago, and so it will get pushed to the bottom and may not display as expected. You can modify the published date, but it’s something to be aware of. 
3. You need to pay attention to the post/page/event’s “featured image”, as this is what will display in the homepage featurette panel at the top.  

Enjoy, and if you have any questions about featuring content on your landing page, please don’t hesitate to reach to us at webteam@bates.edu.

1. Open your slide presentation, pull down the File menu and select Publish to the web.
2. Select the Embed tab.
3. There are a number of options available:
   1. Slide size only matters if you choose the basic method below. Note that if you choose “Medium”, it will overlap the sidebar on laptops, and flow off the page on mobile. If you choose “Small” it will be fairly small, but remember that the user can always view full screen if desired.
   2. Whether to auto-advance slides (and at what time period)
   3. Whether to start the slideshow immediately on page load.
   4. Whether to loop the slides when the end is reached.
   5. Privacy: If you would like to hide the content unless the viewer is signed in with their ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ credentials, open the toggle next to Published content & settings and check the box next to Require viewers to sign in…
4. Click the Publish button.
5. Select the html code in the box that now appears (it starts with <iframe src ). From here, continue with either the basic or more advanced methods below.

Basic Method

6. In WordPress, insert the html block into your page.
7. Paste the code you copied into the block.

Advanced Method

6. Paste the code into a text editor. You need to select the url that appears within the quotes after src=" and up to the next " I’ve highlighted the correct bit in this example:

7. Now, in the block editor insert an iframe block and paste the url into the field. Note that the “iframe” block is specific to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.edu and not available in other WordPress instances.

Optional Thumbnails

You can now add clickable thumbnails to the bottom of a gallery by adding the attribute thumbnails=”true” to the gallery shortcode.