Auto rotating Genesis – Featured Posts

A user wrote to me,

I've had numerous instances over the last couple of years where I've had to accommodate a client request to have a "testimonial rotator" - not an actual slider or carousel or anything, but just a tool that will display a "testimonial" in a spot (sidebar, or page), fade it out, fade in the next, and just cycle through.

...

What I'd *like* to be able to do is to add some code to take the basic Genesis Featured Posts widget - specify my post category, number of posts, order, etc. - and then have the resultant display output one post at a time, fading between, replacing each post with the next, in the same place where it would otherwise display the *list* of posts.

This can be done using a bit of jQuery. I am going to cover both the cases of rotating posts within a single widget and multiple widgets.

Step 1

Add the following in child theme's functions.php:

// Enqueue Scripts.
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'custom_enqueue_scripts' );
function custom_enqueue_scripts() {
    wp_enqueue_script( 'rotating-posts', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/posts-rotator.js', array( 'jquery' ), CHILD_THEME_VERSION, true );
}

Step 2

Create a file named say, posts-rotator.js in child theme's js directory having the following code: