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The folks over at PerfectSurf.de have published a tutorial which goes into detail on how you can create your own personal slideshow to appear on the frontpage of your WordPress powered site. This slideshow feature has been seen in numerous premium themes as of late and now you can create one for yourself via this tutorial. A slideshow is great for showcasing images within a gallery or showing off images related to top news items on your blog. The tutorial is not meant for beginners, but those of you who understand terms such as The Loop, excerpt and permalink, you should be fine.

There are some caveats to this process which are outlined in the requirements:

There are many ways of embedding slideshows to your website. This tutorial is based on a Wordpress 2.5 installation (with some files customized and of course all files updated that were critical in WP2.5 concerning security issues!). Moreover you need to BUY a plugin that was originally developed for “Joomla!”, which is an open source Content Management System (CMS). The plugin is called “frontpage slideshow version 1.6? (FPSS) and it was transformed by its creators into a so called “static version” that fits into ALL websites that are PHP-based.

After going through the tutorial, you’ll notice that you need to change the slideshow file manually in order to update the content the links within the slideshow point to. This seems like a mundane approach. I believe this can be done via custom fields but I’d like to know what other ways this effect can be accomplished without having to purchase anything and without having to manually update the slideshow?

*NOTE* Tobi of the perfectsurf website left a note in the comments regarding this post:

No need to buy the FPSS anymore. I made a new plugin out of Jason Schuller’s FCG plugin, I called it FCS (Featured Category Slideshow) You find everythin at perfectsurf.de/category/fcs (by now, take the first post)