In the Customizer, you’ll find a new section called Blog Feed Settings. This is what we’ll be customizing now.
There are two sections there, one called Carousel and one called Feed Layout.
Customizing the Carousel
The carousel comes activated by default, but if you want to turn it off, that’s where you can do it!
Here are some features of the carousel that are important to remember:
- The carousel will only show posts, not pages or custom images. If you want to display custom images to link to pages, I would recommend disabling the carousel and finding a different plugin that does this.
- The posts need a featured image to show up in the carousel. If they don’t have a featured image, they won’t show up, since there’s nothing to show.
- The carousel will always show up to 6 posts. If you have less than six posts, it will duplicate a few of them. Since the carousel is on a loop, it’s not a problem.
- The carousel will crop your featured images based on the layout that you choose. For better results, we recommend picking a layout that fits with the image size that your site has.
Now, about those options!
You can select if you want the carousel to show all your latest posts, or if you want to show a specific category or tag. This feature can be used to show specific posts, by creating either a new tag for them or a new category. Let’s say you have a handful of posts that are really popular that you want to display in the carousel, what you could do is add a new tag to those posts (like “featured” or “popular”) and display only that new tag.
Next, you can pick the type of carousel layout that you want. I would recommend picking a layout that has a similar size to your images. If you prefer having vertical images (like for Pinterest, for example), then pick the vertical layout. If you like showcasing travel pictures that are horizontal, select the horizontal layout.
Finally, you can disable the text under the carousel if your blog post images already have info on them (like for Pinterest pins, for example). You can also change the date format since it’s currently set to our favorite way (day-month-year) but you can totally change it to month-day-year.
Customizing the Feed Layout
Back to the “Blog Feed Settings”, head to “Feed Layout” this time. This is where you decide which type of layout you’d like to have.
We recommend the standard layout if you have square or horizontal featured images.
We recommend the list layout if you have vertical images.
We recommend the 2-column or 3-column layout for any kind of featured images.
We recommend having the 3-column layout only with a full-width page layout (no sidebar). Otherwise, the posts are kind of squished together.
Once you’ve picked the layout for you, you can change the size of the featured images and the rest of the blog layout under “Theme Settings” > “Content Archives”. We realize it’s quite weird to have those settings separated like that, but some are added by us (like the layouts) and some are provided to all Genesis child themes via the framework itself.
Head to the next article to learn how to set up the Genesis Framework options like the demo!
