I play around with Word­Press all the time. I use my own per­sonal blog as a test bed for new plu­g­ins and to improve on my own under­stand­ing of HTML, CSS, & PHP. I am by no means an expert, but I can hack away at any­thing for hours. That being the case, I recently took a Pre­mium Theme that I got from the Stu­dio­Press Mar­ket­place called, “Polit­ica.”  You’re see­ing it as you read this post. I could go on and on about why I like this theme, but you can read about that here, (insert post link).

I opted to use SlideDeck’s Word­Press Plu­gin to slide dif­fer­ent con­tent across my home­page in the same area. You can read all about the ben­e­fits of Slid­eDeck and why I like it by going to their web­site. This post is all about the Word­Press Plu­gin ver­sion of Slid­eDeck and not the JQuery version.

One of the things that I did not like with SlideDeck’s Smart Slid­eDeck fea­ture is the inabil­ity to remove the title of the Smart Slid­eDeck that shows up in the con­tent area of the slider. The option is there for reg­u­lar Slid­eDecks, but the option doesn’t exist for Smart Slid­eDecks. If you try to leave it blank, the plu­gin will put the default “Recent Posts” title back in for you automatically.

Why do you care? For me, I don’t need to have, “Recent Posts,” in the con­tent area of the slider. It’s mean­ing­less to me (and to view­ers as well). Add to that the fact that the title of the post is already there, and you can see that it’s just too much title in one area.   I’ll end up with a cleaner look, and can reduce the amount of space I need and more con­tent above the fold.

You can see what I am talk­ing about  in the before and after images in the slider below.  For visual learn­ers, there’s a quick 5 minute screen­cast video to walk you through, step by step, what I did to make the change described above on the 3rd panel.

If you want to know how to set up your first Slid­eDeck, SlideDeck’s Sup­port Site and forums pro­vide alot of good info. They have a ded­i­cated Tuto­r­ial Page as well. You can also go visit the fine folks at MakeUseOf.com. They always have good stuff, and break things down really well so that even Novice users can get started quickly. Here’s the MakeUseOf.com Slid­eDeck tuto­r­ial.

If you want the writ­ten steps, here they are:

Step 1 — Login to Word­Press and open up the Slid­eDeck Set­tings page. Deter­mine which Smart­Deck theme you want to use or are already using. (i.e. light, dark, ver­ti­cal, etc.)

Step 2 — FTP/SSH to your hosted Word­Press Instance and find the Plu­g­ins folder under wp-content.

Step 3 — Open the Slid­eDeck Pro for Word­Press Plu­gin folder, open the skins folder, and then open the folder that is named after your theme.

Step 4 — Copy the theme tem­plate file to your desk­top. It will have a .thtml extension.

Step 5 — Make a copy of the orig­i­nal .thtml file you just down­loaded. You want to have 2 copies of the same file. The orig­i­nal, and one you will modify.

Step 6 — Rename the the copied file so it has a dif­fer­ent file name.

Step 7 — Open the orig­i­nal file (not the renamed one) and look for some­thing like this: <div class=“sd-node sd-node-type sd-node-type-<?php echo $type; ?>”><?php echo $title; ?></div> (in the Light theme, it is around line 30 or 31)

Step 8 — com­ment out the entire line in step 7. It should look like this when done:

<!– <div class=“sd-node sd-node-type sd-node-type-<?php echo $type; ?>”><?php echo $title; ?></div> –>

Step 9 — Save the file.

Step 10 — Upload the mod­i­fied and orig­i­nal file back to your web­server in the same folder ref­er­enced in steps 2–4.

Step 11 — If you get a prompt to rename or over­write, choose over­write (you have the orig­i­nal on your desktop.)

Step 12 — Reload the page after upload is successful.

Step 13 — Ver­ify that that the “Recent Posts” title is now gone.

Note: Dif­fer­ent themes may look dif­fer­ent. Look for the “<?php echo $title; ?>” in any theme tem­plate folder and com­ment it out.

If this helps you, please leave a com­ment, fol­low me on Twit­ter, friend me on Face­book, or sub­scribe to my YouTube Channel.

Thanks,

Shawn

P.S. Here are a cou­ple of bonus videos for you about Stan­dard Slid­eDeck for Word­Press Options for stan­dard Slid­eDeck, and a sec­ond one for Smart Slid­eDeck for Word­Press Options. This slide deck scrolls ver­ti­cally, so check it out.