Posts Slideshow Widget
If post has no featured image, plugin tries to extract any 1st image from that post content and show it instead.
You may customize post title and background color, background color of slider navigation panel. Color is selected from WordPress built-in color pallete. Manual input of color code is available also. Select animation type: slide or fade. Setup slider speed and widget dimensions. You can have as many sliders as you wish with different categories selected. This is mainly useful if you have a dedicated category for photo gallery posts and would like to display recent post title with its featured photo.
Posts Slideshow Widget
The latest version: 1.0. Click the Download button below if you wish to try it.
Quant of downloads: 10324
I developed this plugin as a sponsored one, getting a project as a freelancer at Freelancer.com and we met with a question:
– There are a lot of slider plugins already in the WordPress.org plugin repository. What is the reason to make one more plugin with the same functionality so wide represented in the plugins repository already?
Good question. But answer is very interesting too. After finishing analysis of plugins, which could offer similar functionality, I’ve wondered very much by the results of that investigation. Let’s look together.
Post Slideshow Widget is different from others.
Yes, there are a plenty of different sliders, but only 29 of them use excellent and robust jquery.flexslider.js plugin from WooThemes.
Only 2! of those 29 plugins offer to show in slider images from the recent posts. It is the main purpose for which “Post Slideshow Widget” is developed. What are the differences of “Posts Slideshow Widget” from those 2 plugins?
1) Arconix Flexslider:
– shows post thumbnails (featured images) only, if post has no featured image – no image in slider;
– list of custom post types is not clean, includes attachments and other built-in WordPress post types;
– no filter by categories;
– no color settings for post title color and background and for slider navigation panel background;
– has no Settings page with default values for widget parameters.
2) Recent Posts Flexslider:
– filter only by categories, no custom taxonomy for custom post types filter provided;
– no filter by tags;
– no color settings for post title color and background and for slider navigation panel background;
– if post has no featured image, plugin returns to widget original image from the post: no resizing to widget dimensions, forcing client to download full sized image from the post and raising page load time;
– has no Settings page with default values for widget parameters.
As addition, posts-slideshow-widget uses modified CSS for slider navigation controls, which are placed and shown differently from the way as that Flexslider does originally.
Look on screenshots of plugin Settings page and widget control panel settings:
Settings page of Posts Slideshow Widget
Posts Slideshow Widget control panel
You may take a look on Posts Slideshow Widget in action at my development site.
Is it enough to consider “Posts Slideshow Widget” WordPress plugin quite different in order to be useful for WordPress community?
