I hit a business milestone yesterday – I actually gave up a tiny bit of control and hired someone to code a widget for the upcoming Family Tree 1.2 release.

I’ll have a much longer post about all of the new features and functionality later in the week, but I couldn’t wait to show off the coolness that is my new widget! (We’ve also made the slider proportional to a 6×4″ photo, making it easier to fit images into the frame without extreme cropping.)

Probably the #1 support request we get for Family Tree is “How do I customize the slider to use Pages instead of Posts?” The answer used to be “Edit the slider.php file”—but not any more! Once 1.2 is out (we’re aiming for shortly after Genesis 1.6 is released) the entire homepage will be widgeted, and you’ll be able to use the cool new Easy Slider widget to set it up.

Here are a couple of screenshots of the interface:

Of course, if you don’t want a slider, you can use another widget in there – maybe a Featured Post or Page, or a blog style setup with Genesis Featured Widget amplified. Even a Genesis Post Teaser widget in there could be cool.  This is the standard Genesis Featured Page widget in the Home Featured widget container: