Many of the themes that come with Rainmaker have a custom home page for displaying specific content. Using the built-in ‘Featured Posts’ widget, you can display posts in a grid layout with a title, featured image and text excerpt. Unfortunately, the ‘Featured Posts’ widget does not allow you to select from podcasts, portfolio posts or landing pages.
So, is it possible to display content, other than posts, on your home page? Absolutely! In this tutorial I will show you a small trick to redirect featured posts on your home page to other content on your site.
Video Instructions – click play below
Text instructions
To display recent podcast episodes on the home page using the Featured Posts widget, we will need to create a post version of each podcast. While we create the post, we add a ‘301 redirect’ so when a visitor clicks on the post, they are redirected to the podcast episode instead.
Follow the text instructions below.
1. Create a new post. Add a title, description and featured image. I would also recommend to create a new category for these posts.
**The category we create is going to be used in the ‘Featured Post’ widget settings once we have saved the post.
2. Scroll under the content editing arae and locate the box labelled ‘SEO’. In the ‘SEO’ box, click ‘Advanced’ and in the ‘301 Redirect’ field, paste in the URL for the corresponding podcast episode.
3. Save the post and repeat for the other podcasts you want to feature.
4. Once you are done, go to the ‘Design’ –> ‘Content Areas’ in your Rainmaker Admin area. Within the ‘Featured Posts’ widget settings, select the custom category in the drop down. That way we are only showing one category of posts in the widget. Save the widget settings.
5. To prevent posts from being displayed in your regular blog feed (unless you want to display them there!), you will need to add a small piece of code to your blog page. Follow my tutorial on how to exclude a category of posts from your blog page.
And that’s it!
You can use the above to redirect the featured widget posts to any content you want, such as landing pages, portfolio posts, LMS content and library books.