We got an overwhelming response and lot of suggestions to include some new features to Smooth Slider. So check out this new version of the free wordpress plugin Smooth Slider with lot of lovely features added.
Noted below are the new features I have added to the slider in this upgrade.
1. Slider Preview in Smooth Slider’s setting page
Now you can directly check out the preview of all the changes you have made to the Smooth Slider looks on the Smooth Slider options page before actually embedding the slider to your blog. You can keep on trying different fonts, sizes and colors and save changes, and at the same time view the preview how the slider would look. After finalizing your design, just insert the template tag into your blog’s home page or any other page wherever slider is required.
2. Facility to set transparent background to the slider
Using this feature, you can create a div as per your theme, having either some proper background image or rounded corners, and put the smooth slider template tag inside that div. Your smooth slider would look as an integrated part of your theme – a perfectly designed one!
3. Convert it to pure Image Slider
You can now turn off all the text and the ‘Read More’ link from the slider and just give proper thumbnail image height and width to make the Smooth Slider as a pure image slider.
4. Remove all the posts from Smooth Slider in one click
There is some issue with edit screen autosave functionality and Smooth Slider due to which for some blogs sometimes an autosave post automatically gets added to Smooth Slider. This is very rare scenario but it has happened with some of us. This new feature would help you out to clear the Smooth Slider in one go, so that there are no posts in the slider and you can add the necessary featured post in a fresh way!
5. Custom Images in place of navigation numbers
This is a very attractive feature, for those who wish to use custom images in place of navigation numbers 1, 2, 3 etc. Now we have added a setting on the Smooth Slider options page, from which you can select what kind of navigation buttons you wish to use. If you wish to use custom images, go to the images folder of smooth-slider plugin (wp-content –> plugins –> smooth-slider –> images), put the custom images with name slide1.png, slide2.png, slide3.png and so on. We have used CSS splices in order to get a different image for active slide. You need to create your custom image in the same manner i.e. horizontally, left half representing the normal slide navigation background and right half representing the slide navigation background when the slide is in active state. In the plugin package, we have already included 5 custom images. You can just go and replace them with your images. This is must that you create the image with two images one for navigation button, and other for when the button is representing an active slide.
You can refer the demo for custom navigation images at http://www.staenzwebsolutions.com, where we have implemented new features such as transparent background and image navigation to the slider.
There were some fixes with the CSS style id and class names. We made them specific to Smooth Slider to avoid probable conflicts with theme styles and other plugins. To get more details about ongoing communication and discussion about Smooth Slider, please visit the Smooth Slider Forum on Internet Techies.
To check the features in previous versions please visit the release note for initial release 1.0 of Smooth Slider and release note for version 1.1 of Smooth Slider.
Once you try out the plugin, please drop in and put your comments and suggestions. Those would turn out to be very useful guidelines and motivation for us to improve the plugin.