wordpress-featured-content-sliders

I can remember a few years back when jQuery sliders and WordPress Featured Content Slider plugins were limited to a few broken versions in the official plugin repository – and the random free code you could copy and paste from the web. Now there are a LOT of great slider and featured content plugins in the plugin directory – in fact 192 of them just for the search term “slider“. Sometimes these are called gallery plugins, carousel plugins, featured articles, featured posts, featured slideshow, sticky widgets, and more. Also, some of these plugins integrate with HTML5, audio, video, Flash, jQuery, and more.

To make your life a little easier – we’ve already sorted through ALL of them, and I’m only going to show you ones that have about a 4 star review or above AND that have been updated at least in 2011, and that have 1,000 downloads or more. We also weeded out any ones that we tried and that didn’t work right, or had problems. We tried each one out in a dev test site running WordPress 3.2, but just check the plugin details (in the future) to see what it’s compatible with – and last time it was updated.

So without further ado, here we go – 13 Amazing featured content slider plugins for WordPress!

1. Featured Articles Lite

Featured Articles Lite has a 4 star rating and more than 10,000 downloads. The fact that it’s called a “Lite” plugin is ironic, since it’s a fancy Javascript slider (uses Mootools) with all kinds of cool features, and has options for light, dark, text, images, and even transparent overlay. This is what you would expect from a content image slider, the ability to add a graphic, heading, text, a “read-more” link, and some pagination back and forth through the items. Check out the screenshots of all the different versions>. It’s a fairly mature plugin, now at revision 2.3.7. Keep in mind that this slider plugin actually uses the content of existing posts or pages that you have published and “features” them in a slider carousel fashion.

Configuration: When you first run the plugin for the first time it asks you who to set what user roles have permission to use it like this:

featured-articles-configuration

You can just leave it as admin if you want, then go to the “edit/add” screen to configure some sliders. Each slider you setup has all kinds of options for you to choose from.

featured-articles-slider-setup

You can see in the image above the first settings are to display the slider in a loop, how many characters to truncate descriptions to both with and without an image, what HTML tags are allowed, how many articles to include in the slider, the display order (newest posts, featured posts, most commented, random order), thumbnail size, slider size, and whether to dipslay thumbnails or author links. Since you can set the size of the slider, you can even add this as a sidebar widget (but more on that later).

featured-articles-slider-setup2

The image above are even more settings, where you can actually choose what content the slider shows (the “Content Settings” section). You can choose whether your featured content will be drawn from post or pages (one OR the other, not both), you can choose the text for the “read more” link, and whether or not the article title is a clickable link.

In the “Display Settings” are you actually chose WHERE the slider will show up. This is particularly handy if you’ve moved your blog to the homepage to an inner page, and made an inner page your homepage. With this feature you can assign the slider to the proper page directly from the dashboard (without having to edit any theme code). Your options are to show the slider on one, none, or any category page, and then any static pages, AND / or your homepage. You can also choose whether the navigation for the sliders is on the bottom, or the sides.

You can choose whether or not to have a read more link, whether the article title is clickable:

featured-articles-save-slider

As if that weren’t enough, you can give your slider section a title, and then select from one of the 4 included themes. You can also choose the JavaScript settings for the duration of the slide effect, fade distance, whether the slides enter from the left or top, whether navigation click stops auto sliding, and whether users can use a mouse wheel for navigation in the sliders. You can choose to autoslide every xx seconds as well.

The fact that this plugin allows you to add a featured content slider to your site without having to edit any theme code at all makes it one of our top picks – and we hadn’t even mentioned that it comes with it’s own sidebar widget! Keep in mind that you have to setup a slider with a widget the same or less than your sidebar in order for it to work. But it’s so easy to drag the “FA Lite Slider” to your sidebar and then just a slider (once it’s created). If you absolutely have to manually add a slider to a specific section of your site (like the header or footer, or very custom page) – hey, that’s an option too! There’s not much you can’t do with this thing.

Download Featured Articles Lite here.

Here’s a shot of the light style in action:

featured-content-slider

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2. Featured Content

Featured Content is a plugin that barely breaks our rule of 2011 updates (it was last updated on Dec 15th of 2010), but it has a 5 star rating and has been downloaded 3,000+ times. We decided to list this one because it’s unique, and you’ll see why.

This plugin creates a custom post type for the featured content it displays and allows you to feauture content in your sidebar or pages that either open posts directly, or display in cool little modal windows.

featured-content-shortcode

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in the image above you see some featured content images that were displayed using shortcodes.

featured-content-sidebar

The image above is how it looks in a sidebar.

featured-content-modal-window

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The image above is how the featured content displays in the modal window (if you use that option).

Configuration: To setup the featured content areas this plugin uses either widgets or shortcodes.

featured-content-slider-setup

In the image above the general features (settings) are the choice of index slude, indentifier, permalink structure for the custom post types, plural and singular name, and you can choose to enable thumbnails, taxonomies, custom fields, comments, trackbacks, or revisions (or not).

This plugin is really cool, but we would say it’s for WordPress users on an intermediate to advanced level. Also, it’s only at version 0.3.1 (but did seem to work well).

Download the Featured Content plugin here.

3. WP Featured Content Slider

Well, the first thing we liked about the WP Featured Content Slider was that there was a demo for us to check out. That’s always a plus! It does support manual insertion of the slideshow, and supports shortcodes as well. It has a 4 star rating on 45,000+ downloads, and is in version 2.1.

featured-content-slider

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The image above is what the featured content slider might look like in your theme.

featured-content-slider-setup

Configuration: The image above are the settings for this plugin which seem a bit basic compared to some of the others. You do get 4 effect options, and you can set height, width, background color, bg color, border, text color, and image width and height (which is great).

What’s missing here are the options for how many posts or pages to use as “featured content” (and which ones to use).

featured-content-slider-page-options

That’s because the option of what pages and posts to include are actually on the post and page edit screens like in the image above.

set-featured-image

In the image above you’ll another item on page and post edit screens, the ability to set a “featured image” (for that page or post to be in the slider).

The nice thing about this plugin is it’s easy to use without a ton of options to worry about. It’s easy to add the slider to any page or post using the [featslider] shortcode, but it couldn’t be any bigger than the content area of that page (which is a drawback). You can manually add the slider with the PHP code, and there doesn’t appear to be any widget support. All in all, if you need a simple slider, this can do the job.

Download WP Featured Content Slider Here.

4. Feature Slideshow

Feature Slideshow has 9,000+ downloads and 4 star review, now in 1.1.1-beta. It’s easy to choose the size of the slideshow, and this one (unlike others) has the ability to choose the number of posts to be displayed or the ability to use specific post categories OR tags. It has automatic scaling and cropping of images, and you can see a demo here.

feature-slideshow-demo

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You can see in the demo above that this is the type of featured content slideshow found in may popular premium themes. It’s nice because it has the links and text in a shaded area to the left, with an arrow pointing to the image on the right.

Configuration: Basic options are broken down into visual settings and post settings as follows:

feature-slideshow-options

You can set the slideshow widget, list width, overlay text size, title color, transition interval, number of posts to show, and post type (posts or pages).

feature-slideshow-advanced-settings

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There are also some advanced settings, where you can choose the order, child ID’s of parent pages, and specific categories.

When you setup a slideshow, all posts to be displayed must have a featured image. You also have to enter a short description in the “feature slideshow options” metabox on the post edit screens. There is no widget support, you can add slideshows using shortcodes or manual PHP insertion into your WP theme. This plugin is best used by WP users with intermediate to advanced experience levels.

Download Feature Slideshow here.

5. SM Sticky Featured Widget

SM Sticky Featured Widget is only a widget, but if you only want to feature content in a widget – this may be just what you need! You can use thumbnails (or not), and has the cool option to display “category related sticky posts” when the widget appears on category pages. You can make this thing work quickly just by making posts “sticky”.

sm-sticky-featured-widget

The example above is what it looks like with thumbnails in a WordPress site using a classified theme. The plugin has 2,600+ downloads and is in version 1.1.0 with a 4 star rating. We won’t go into any specific configuration options, it’s pretty easy to use.

Download SM Sticky Featured Widget here.

6. Promotion Slider

We always like things that have unique applications, because when it comes to featured content, sliders, and carousels – the one thing they all tend to have in common it that they’re all so similar. You’re about to see some examples that might change your mind about that – and give you some new ideas. The Promotion Slider plugin has had 37,000+ plugins for version 3.3.1 with an average rating of 4 1/2 stars. They even have a cool demo video.

The main features this plugin boasts are ad management from the dashboard, creation of unique pages for each promotion, a jQuery animation that’s actually “SEO friendly”, default styles, the ability to link to external URL’s (w00t!), the ability to display third party ad code, title and/or excerpt support, the ability to add multiple sliders to one page without conflicts, and works with custom post types.

Let’s look at some example screenshots:

promotion-slider1

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Wow, not your standard slider – huh!

promotion-slider-settings2

Examples with ad image, text title, and link.

promotion-slider3

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The example above has cool thumbnail image navigation!

Configuration: Let’s fire this thing up and see what it does!

promotion-slider-sidebar

One installed you’ll see the options appear in your sidebar like the image above. If you’ve used WP 3.0+ custom post types, you’ll realize right away that the ability to manage promotions and add new ones are just custom post type screens (awesome!).

add-new-promotion

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The screen above is the add new promotion edit screen.

promotion-slider-options

The image above is the area below the content area on the add new promotion page. You have the ability to change the linking behaviour (open in same page or new window), and you can set the link to an external URL if you don’t want to use the internal post link page (awesome!). Or you can even check the box to “insert ad code”, and leave the add new promotion content area blank, and add some ad code in here (like adsense, VERY cool).

use-content-delivery-network

If THAT weren’t enough – there’s even one more option field to serve the URL of the image (if you’re using one) from a custom content delivery network!

promotion-slider-category

The Promotion Slider has it’s own category screen, because the items are custom post types – you can set distinct categories for them (completely separate from post categories!). That means you can bin your ads in all kinds of different new ways for display.

promotion-slider-options1

The first section of Promotion Slider’s options are “Slider Settings”. You can choose to start on the first slide (or a random one), automatic slide advancement can be on or off, and you can set default thumbnail size.

promotion-slider-settings2

The second set of settings for Promotion Slider are for display. You can choose from 5 types of slider navigation, 3 kinds of title display, and whether or not to display the excerpt in the slider. You even get advanced settings for loading the javascript in the header of footer!

In the end, we found this plugin pretty robust for all levels of WP experience. We LOVE the fact that you can (finally) create a slider without having to use normal posts and pages! The ability to use custom post types and their own categories is a God-send. Also, the added ability to point to external links and use third party ad code, again – WOW! It has a great shortcode, with 13 different additional attributes you can use with it, see the FAQ for full info. You can even use the shortcodes in a text widget!

The only bad thing we can say about this plugin was there wasn’t a lot of options for styling the display – HOWEVER, in the FAQ there’s info about how to give a slider it’s own HTML id so you can style it any way you want. So that’s our only complaint – that there aren’t more display style layouts to choose from (out of the box). If that’s our only complaint, well I guess that isn’t so bad, is it?

Download Promotion Slider here.

7. Smooth Slider

Smooth Slider has a 4 star rating and more than 102,000+ downloads for version 2.3.5 – so it’s pretty mature (and widely used).

At first we didn’t know why – because the display is pretty basic:

smooth-slider

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Then again, if something is simple and works, it’s popular right? What you see is what you get, an image, title, description, and some basic navigation. You’ll also see in that image a link back to the plugin site, but there’s an option to disable it Misc settings.

Configuration: One thing we liked about this plugin was the fact that as you build a slider, there’s a “preview” pane at the top of the page – so you can see what the thing is going to look like in advance. We wish all the slider plugins had this. This pluggin does allow you to setup multiple sliders, and has the ability to add them to pages with either a shortcode, or manual PHP code.

smooth-slider-box

In the image above you see the slider box options. You can change the slide interval, transition speed, number of posts to show in the slideshow, background color (with color picker), slider height and width, and border color.

The navigation button options are pretty exhaustive, you can show next and prev, nothing, numbers, you can even choose the image size or custom text or HTML (for your own images). We hadn’t seen that many options for navigation in the other plugins.

slider-title-post-title

For the slider and post title options you can choose text, where to get the title from (slider name or default title), font face, size, style, etc.

thumbnail-image-options

In thumbnail image options you can choose how to pick images, how to align image, the image size and max height, border thickness and color, and even a checkbox to convert smooth slider to an image slider (with no content).

slider-content

In the slider content options you can choose the font face, font color, font style, where to pick content from (content, excerpts, custom fields), and max content size in both words and characters.

misc-slider-settings

The Misc slider settings allow you to turn off the link back to the plugin on the front end display, offer the ability to retain certain HTML tags, the “read more” text, who can add posts to the slider, randomization, text to display for browsers without Javascript support, whether or not to allow shortcode support, styles to use, whether or not to enable the multiple slider (per page) option, and even an option to enable or disable the “flash of unstyled content” you see on so many pages loading sliders.

I guess NOW we see why a plugin that at first seemed so basic, had so many downloads! The configuration options are nearly endless! You could use this plugin with any level of WP experience, but just be prepared for the myriad of setup options. If you want fine grained control to configure EVERYTHING (and you’re ok with a basic display) then this is the plugin for you.

Download Smooth Slider here.

8. Easy Nivo Slider

Next we look at Easy Nivo Slider, which has a 4 star rating on 11,000+ downloads in version 1.6.1. Like some of the other sliders which we chose for various reasons, Easy Nivo has some unique configuration options of it’s own. Like the ability to add the slider to a post or page with no coding using a button on the WP visual editor toolbar! Also, you can build sliders from post images, featured images in posts, or from NextGen galleries. In addition, it uses WordPress native thumbnail supporrt, to make sure all the images fit the sliders you build.

One thing we should tell you is that a lot of the slider plugins just build upon an already existing open source jQuery slider. “Nivo” is an open source jQuery plugin, so there are multiple WordPress slider plugins with “Nivo” in the name (that go by all kinds of different names). So follow our download links, or be sure to explicitly search for “Easy Nivo Slider” to install the one we’re reviewing here.

Another thing is, (this) Nivo slider is primarily for images. There’s caption support, but you’ll see in the following examples how that looks:

novi-slider-images

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The plugin has slider settings for a first slider, second slider, and even a widget slider:

easy-nivo-slider-settings

First slider options are above, with size, number of slices, linking, opacity, navigation, and “jump to slide” navigation.

easy-nivo-slider-preview

This plugin also has a “preview” screen, where you can also choose image selection and slider settings. You can choose one of 14 different transition options.

easy-nivo-slider-settings2

On the settings screen you can choose whether or not to activate NextGen gallery supporrt, use debug mode, and how to load the code.

nivo-slider-visual-editor

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In the image above you can see where the button is to add a slider from the visual editor on the edit screen for posts or pages.

easy-nivo-slider-post-options

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The image above shows the options for adding a slider to a post – where you can chose slider size, transition, speed, and pause. There are 2 other tabs for featured images slider options, and NextGen Slider options.

All in all this is a great little plugin that any WP user of any experience level could use. Just keep in mind it’s basically for images – but the NextGen gallery support is nice, and the ability to add from the visual editor (without any coding) EVEN nicer!

Download Easy Nivo Slider here.

9. NextGen Gallery Sliders

Ok, since the last plugin had NextGen Gallery support, and there are a lot of NextGen Gallery slider plugins out there – let’s just give you some basic options (if that’s what you’re looking for).

There’s JJ NextGen JQuery Slider:

jj-nextgen-slider

Here’s NextGen Image List

nextgen-image-list

Also JJ NextGen jQuery Carousel

nextgen-carousel

10. UnPointZero Slider

The UnPointZero Slider has a 4 star review on version 2.1.5 with 6,000+ downloads. It has fully customizable CSS, and you can set slider navigation with arrows, numbers, or even advanced options with thumbnails. It has shortcode support and you can use manual PHP code insertion where you want it to display.

We included it because the layouts are what you would come to expect from a slider, like these examples:

unpointzero-slider1

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The image above shows a slider with Title and overlay text, and the navigation are thumbnails with text to the right.

unpoint-zero2

The image above is a slider exaple with just image and overlay, and simple arrow based navigation.

unpointzero-slider3

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And this example is an image with overlay text a bit smaller, and number based navigation in the top right corner.

Configuration: On the settings page for Unpointzero slider, the first thing you see is the “Embed Code and shortcode” section. It’s very refreshing to see this right on the settings page, so you don’t have dig through a readme file or plugin page to find the right PHP code or shortcode to use to insert the slider. If even shows the shortcode or PHP code to insert multiple sliders.

unpointzero-general-options

The General options for the plugin are whether to use posts or pages, and after that there’s a unique feature where you can use either the page/post names OR ID numbers to be included in the slider. The next section is “only for POSTS” – where you choose the number of posts to be displayed. You can choose all posts (not recommended), 10 posts, 20 posts, or auto.

unpointzero-display-settings

In display settings you can choose the number of slides, characters for the title and description, and width and height of the front image and small images.

unpointzero-slider-style

You also get to choose whether or not to display thumbnails in navigation, the title or description, mouseover actions, and even a special setting for displaying non-Latin languages (like Hebrew, Chinese, etc.).

The Unpointzero slider plugin is pretty intuitive with standard options. Normal posts and pages are used as the “featured content” for the slides. This plugin is best used by users with intermediate to advanced WP experience levels. One thing we didn’t particularly like was that the plugin documentation and settings page don’t really say where the images for the slides come from. We did finally figure out that it’s the post featured images:

set-featured-image2

We kind of figured that, but the plugin documentation should have said it (for people that don’t know). You just have to set a featured image for each post being included in the slider. All in all, if you want a slider that looks like one of standard slider design examples we showed – this will do the job.

Download Unpointzero Slider here.

11. jQuery Slider

The jQuery Slider has 5 star ratings for 14,000+ downloads in version 1.3. This plugin is very basic, but does what’s expected. It produces a nice looking featured slider with some overlay text like this:

jquery-slider

In the top right it displays an active timer before the next slide displays in a “0-60” circle fashion. You can see the demo here. You can insert the slider either via shortcode on PHP code.

Configuration: The options are basic, but the plugin works well.

jquery-slider-options

You can see in the options above you only get 5 things, width, height, pause on hover, show pagination, and show navigation.

This plugin uses custom post types to setup your slides, which is a great feature we saw in a few earlier examples. Sometimes you just don’t want to use your existing posts and pages as featured content, and the option to setup custom posts for the slider is really great.

jquery-slider-setup

The image above is the example of the slider management screen.

jquery-slider-editing

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The image above is simplicity at it’s best. You just give the slide a title, and description, and then set the featured image. Having exhaustive options is great (when you need them), but this is a plugin that we would feel comfortable telling users with beginner WP experience levels to use.

With the shortcode you can add the slider easily to a post or page, or even in a text widget. There aren’t a ton of layout options, but sometimes you just don’t need all that.

Download jQuery Slider here.

12. Related Posts Slider

We included the related posts slider because it does something very unique. It adds a slider beneath your content for “related posts”. It has both shortcode and widget support. It can show a slider either in news style, or horizontal carousel format. You can add as many related posts as you want, you get complete CSS customization (with 2 styles in the box), and it’s even compatible with the YARPP or WordPress Related Posts plugin.

Here’s the example of news style format:

related-posts-slider-example

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The points on the top and bottom show which elements are customizable.

Here’s the horizontal carousel format layout example:

related-posts-slider-example2

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This is a very nice compact slider design with thumbnail and title, and left and right navigation arrows. This is a very cool layout, and something you normally only see on high-end news sites.

Configuration: To use this plugin you first have to install the YARPP or WordPress Related Posts.

related-posts-slider-options

In the image above for overall slider settings, you see you have to choose which plugin you’re using and the slider format (default or carousel). Then select a style, number of posts, slider height, background color, foreground color, background for hover, text color for hover, outer border thickness, outer border color,and inner border thickness, and inner border color.

slider-title

The the slider title options you can set the text, font type, font size, weight, and style.

thumbnail-image-settings

In thumbnail image settings you can use a custom field or key namefor images, or featured images, but there’s even an option to consider images fromm within the post. This is a great featured because you can set it to use the post image (if there is one), but the featured image as a backup. So if you’ve got 300 posts and have been blogging since before there was “featured images” in WP 3.0+ – you can use both old and new posts. You can also choose alignment, image width, and width and height.

list-section

In list section settings you can choose the font face, color, size, weight, and style – along with max words in the title.

preview-section

For the preview section you can choose title font, color, size, weight, style, the same for content font, where to pick content from (excerpt, custom fields, or content), max words, whether or not to show read more (and the text for it), what HTML to retain, and whether or not to open links in a new window.

The last section of options for the Related Posts slider is “Manual Insertion”:

manual-insertion

This is something we’d like to see ALL the slider plugins have, the ability to insert the slider before the content, after the content, or manually (quickly and easily). You can also choose to turn the link back to the plugin author on the front end on or off.

This plugin is unique and has great options. We don’t have to show how to add related posts to the slider, because the YARPP or WordPress Related Posts plugin(s) do that automatically, and the settings page determines how those posts are displayed. Although there are a ton of setup options, this is a plugin that someone with any level of WP experience could setup and use.

Download Related Posts Slider here, or install from your WordPress dashboard.

13. Content Slider by SlideDeck

We saved the Content Slider by SlideDeck for last because it’s very unique. It has 92,000+ downloads on a 4 star review of version 1.4. This is the only plugin we listed that has both a Free and a paid Premium version, and we’ll go over those options.

The things that make the Content Slider stand out are that you can add images, video, or mp3 audio to the slides, it has a drag and drop interface, you can use the built-in WordPress “Kitchen Sink” editor to format the slides, you can preview the slides as you’re building them, and it’s SEO optimized. The PRO version has touchscreen support for Apple devices, you can create vertical slides, you can apply skins and themes, and you can create smart slidedecks from RSS feeds.

So, let’s look at some exampe layouts – shall we?

content-slider-example

This is an example slider with image, title, content, navigation – as you can see it’s beautifully styled!

content-slide-example2

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You can see a full width example slider above with navigation, and overlay title and text in a smoky strip at the slide top.

Now check out THIS example:

content-slider-example3

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This is an example of a slider that’s accordion style with 4 sections. Click on each section to expand. This first slide actually has a video in it that you can play IN THE SLIDER!

content-slider-video

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The image above shows what happens when you click play on the video (the screenshot is of the actual video playing). The rest of the slider goes away, and you get video controls and a “back” button. How awesome is that?

content-slider-within

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Pay close attention to the example above because that slider example is NOT what you think it is. If you look where my mouse pointer is on the left, you’ll see the vertical strip with the 4 icons. EACH ONE of those icons is clickable AND if you click any one of them, it loads a new slide WITHIN THAT SLIDE! If you think about it, it’s actually a featured content slider WITHIN a featured content slider!

content-slider-popup-window

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In the example above it’s actually a slide with 4 clickable areas. I clicked on the + icon in this example – which displays the popup as shown. But that’s not all…

content-slider-video-popup

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When I clicked the play button icon in the example image above, the popup actually has a VIDEO in it that loads on the page without reloading (from within the slider). OMG! Talk about a geeky heart attack! View all those examples here.

Configuration: Now (of course) all that cool vertical slide stuff is only available in the PRO version. So the main questions are – how easy is this thing to setup, and what can you do with the free version out of the box? The PRO Premium version is $99 for a single site, so let’s see what we can do with the free open source version from the WordPress repository.

There are basically 2 ways to add slides, you can “add new” or “add smart slide deck”.

add-new-slidedeck

To add a new slide deck, start by giving it a name, and then go through and give each slide a title, and some content. You can see you can format the content any way you want with a visual or HTML editors, and ability to upload images, or even upload and set background images.

slidedeck-options

In the “add new” edit screen you have slidedeck options to autoplay, loop, show active corner indicator, allow keyboard navigation, or mouse scroll wheel. You can hide the title bars, choose animation speed, the skin (7 styles), and what slide to start on.

slidedesk-reoder-slides

You can also reorder the slides with drag and drop from the edit screen as in the image above. The only weird non-intuitive features is that the “add another slide” button is within the re-order slides widget (only). So if you don’t know how to add another slide, you may spend a few minutes looking.

slidedeck-theme-code

You can get the theme code snippet (for manual insertion) from the slide edit screen. Those were some great options for adding a slide deck. Now let’s take a look at adding a “smart slidedeck”.

add-smart-slidedeck

First you give it a name, and then choose a skin style.

smart-slidedeck-options2

Then you choose the total numbber of slides to display, playback options, type of content (recent posts, featured posts, popular posts, filter posts by category), you can validate images, and choose the navigation type.

So with the Content Slider plugin you can actually create a content slider that has unique content all it’s own (we showed that in the “Add new” example above). Or, with the smart slide deck you can actually create a content slider from your existing content. In all the previous plugins we tested they either used existing content, or had the ability to create custom slides. This is the only plugin we found that does both.

When you create a smart slidedeck, you can even preview it lightbox style:

smart-slidedeck-preview

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AND, you can even change the slide dimensions LIVE in the preview!

Once you add a new (custom) slidedeck, or create a “smart” slidedeck, you can easily go back and edit them from the edit screen:

edit-slidedecks

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So, with the Content Slider plugin you can add as many slidedecks as you want. So far we could do a TON of stuff with the Free open source version. What we haven’t looked at yet was how to add a slider into your site (other than the manual PHP code snippet we got on the edit screen).

If you go to any normal post or page edit screen in your WordPress dashboard you’ll see this box above the “publish” section on the right:

content-slider-add

You can choose the slide title (if that post or page is going to be a slide), and you can check the checkbox to “feature this post in smart slidedecks”.

At the bottom there’s also a button to “Insert SlideDeck”.

insert-content-slider

(click image for full size)

When you click that button you get the dialogue box above, where you can choose to insert any of your existing slidedecks, and you can even set the dimentions right there!

embed-a-slidedeck

Once embedded the shortcode is automatically added to your post or page in the edit box, as in the example above. We also used that image to show that if you’re using the visual editor there’s also a bright colored “SD” icon on the toolbar to embed a slidedeck as well.

So, while we found the free version to be incredible for the content slider – you probably want to know what’s missing that only comes with the PRO (paid) version. What you get with PRO is support (yay!), it’s unbranded, you get vertical slide capability, RSS Feed Smart SlideDeck capability, Background image support, and API capability (for the programmers in the crowd). Oh, PRO has touchscreen support as well.

In our opinion, the Content Slider is the most intuitive, has the most features, and the free version will work for most uses. It could easily be setup by users with any level of WordPress experience, and inserting sliders to your site is a breeze. This plugin is very mature, well thought out, and the only one that you can either create sliders with custom or existing content, AND use audio, video, images, AND text from within the slides.

Download the free open source version of Content Slider here, or install from your WordPress dashboard.

Conclusion

We covered some amazing WordPress slider plugins, and there should be one there for about any use you would have no matter what your experience level. Just make sure to choose one you feel comfortable using, that meets your needs. Figure out in advance if it’s better (for you) to use a featured content slider that uses existing post and page content, or that creates distinctly different content to be used exclusively for the slider. Every one of the plugins featured is completely free, and can be installed from the “Plugins->Add Plugins” page of your WordPress dashboard from the official repository. Have fun!

JTPratt Media is a web development company in the midwest building custom themes and custom WordPress plugins.