Best WordPress Slideshow Plugin
After a suggestion was made to revamp the design of my boss’ company website to which the boss agreed, I immediately googled out for some inspiring website designs that would be both functional and pleasing to the eyes. One employee showed me some website designs she liked. Most involved a lot of animated images, most probably embedded flash elements. And all of them have black backgrounds. Having earlier known some of my boss’ likes and dislikes, I am not sure if he would agree to these suggested designs. Just the same, it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.
Since there seems to be a focused attention on animated elements, based on the suggestions, I fear I may have to research on the area of embedding flash files in a wordpress web site. But before embarking on that mission, I had this idea of trying out the available wordpress slideshow plugins first. A slideshow of course is not as flashy and flexible as the real flash apps, but these just might work in place of embedding flash files. I discovered this plugin called the superb-slideshow plugin which can output a slideshow of images plus the following major features:
- Automatically pause the slide show on hover.
- Insert a line of text at the bottom portion.
- Insert link code so that the whole slideshow box is a link for each particular image.
- Multiple slideshows.
WordPress Slideshow Plugin Test
I tested the wordpress slideshow plugin and it does work. Gopi, the plugin’s author promptly responded to some questions I threw at him and helped me with the effects I wanted to output. I have yet to see of course the implementation, if it could be done and if he has the time to work on it, of some of my suggestions like the following:
- Option to choose to have the current black background of the text into ‘transparent’.
- Option to choose the vertical location of the text. e.g. middle, or top.
All in all, I think the plugin is pretty good. In the sample slideshow above, I choose not to use text since the black background bar tends to ruin the irregular shape effect.
You can download this wordpress slideshow plugin at the wordpress site, or you can visit the author’s homepage: Gopi’s Homepage.
(Note: The last time I updated this wordpress slideshow plugin, all the newly created files (xml and images) within the slideshow directory were deleted. The plugin author, Gopi, may have to re-do some coding in order to address this issue. So, in the meantime, should you decide to use this plugin, be sure to backup your xml and image files under the slideshow directory especially prior to updating to a newer version of the plugin.)
Update: As of version 4.0, the coder of this plugin still hasn’t addressed the issue of the deleted images and xml files. As soon as I updated, the images and xml files I created were gone, and a slew of error messages got displayed in this post. What I did is to create a folder of my images outside the plugin’s folder. This way, it won’t get deleted on update. As for the xml file, I got no choice but to backup before an update.
Update: 12/23/2011. By some careless lapse, I accidentally updated the plugin. Like before, the slideshow again messed itself up. Like before Gopi the plugin’s author have updated his plugin but never addressed the complaint of many users about his inability to correct a glaring error in his code design. All created xml are wiped out on each update. Since, the update I made was accidental, I was not able to back up my xml file. Darn.
Planned future posts: wordpress gallery plugin, slideshow pro wordpress plugin, wordpress album plugin, flickr slideshow plugin, wordpress plugins images, jquery cycle, wp slideshow plugin, jquery slideshow plugin.