Hooking your slider up to the backend of wordpress

If you have used a slider or similar API then you know that having to rewrite html is a pain in the butt to add or remove slider images.

Most slider APIs have you call an unordered list as your slider…and a list item is the actual image in the slider.

Example

<ul class="slider">
	<li><img src=""/></li>
	<li><img src=""/></li>
	<li><img src=""/></li>
</ul>

If you wanted to hook this up very easily to the wordpress backend you could using

<div class="slider">
<ul>
<?php

// The Query
$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );

// The Loop
while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) : $the_query->the_post();
	echo '<li>' . if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
	the_post_thumbnail();
}  . '</li>';
endwhile;

// Reset Post Data
wp_reset_postdata();
?>
</ul>
   </div>

If you pass $args an argument for say…a category slider posts See WP_Query and you make sure each post that was in that category had a featured image. Then you effectively have an easy way to add & upload slider images.

Dont forget to add add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' ); to your functions.php file.

Thank you, wordpress users.