Wordpress Featured Post by Category Content Slider/Cycle

Question

For a client project I need to create a featured content slider that will live on the home page. The slider will contain 4 separate slides based on top-level post categories. There will be 1 featured post for each of the 4 top-level categories. So, a total of 4 slides at any given time. Each slide will contain the posts featured image, the post title, and post date. The post title and post date will be displayed beneath the featured image. For navigation, there will be 4 buttons above the slide area. Once button for each of the four categories. I am pretty new to javascript, jquery, etc. and am hoping someone can direct me to some tutorials or other learning materials so that I can create this type of slider. Also, I'd appreciate any recommendations on how best to setup this type of slider and integrate it with Wordpress.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Since you're asking for learning materials, I'll assume you won't be afraid to dig into the code a bit... But I don't think you'll need to create anything from scratch, which is nice.

Chris Coyier created a nice jQuery plugin called AnythingSlider. While I think it's cool, it's just another slider plugin and there are tons out there. What makes it special is that a few WordPress plugin authors got together to create the AnythingSlider WordPress Plugin. It might be exactly what you're looking for, if not very close.

If you want to get into building one on your own, I found this tutorial pretty helpful. (It's $7 but I think it's worth it for the hand holding that comes along with it). You can certainly tweak this to fit what you're looking for exactly.

Hope that helps a bit, have fun with the project!