WordPress Slider Mania

Sliders are staples in websites nowadays. A homepage without a slideshow seems an oddity considering the media intensive content this generation craves for. For all the benefits sliders give website owners, there are indeed some sliders that really standout from the rest. Below is a listing of 5 of the most popular sliders available in the market today:

Slider Revolution

Considered the most popular plugin in the Envato marketplace, Slider Revolution is a slider definitely worth considering. This plugin features tons of unique transition effects, an image preloader, video embedding, autoplay that stops on user interaction and lots of easy to set options to create your own effects. This plugin is one of the few that offers full screen slideshows, it is also noted for enabling almost any type of content that can be put in a slideshow, and, it is quite popular for its responsive feature as well. The plugin also enables easy slider creation using Visual Builder. Using its animation builder, you can conveniently drag and drop captions, and, create your own custom animation easily. Slider Revolution also allows you to integrate SEO optimization measures on your slides thus further improving your page’s performance on search engines.

Royal Slider

This slider plugin was created especially for mobile devices. What makes Royal Slider standout is its affinity toward touch screen interfaces. Create your own custom slideshows and css3 banner rotators with images, videos or HTML content in slides, allow dynamic population of data from Flickr, Instagram, Featured posts and even WooCommerce products, display vertical or horizontal thumbnails with the plugin’s photo gallery. While it doesn’t have much of fancy transition effects, Royal does guarantee a stable, accessible, high performance slider experience on any device. RoyalSlider is tested on Mac, PC, iPad 2, iPhone 4, HTC Desire, Lumia 920, Surface, Blackberry PlayBook and even on Kindle Keyboard

Layer Slider

Layer slider is most noted for its use of cutting edge technology to give you more than 200 preset 2D and 3D slide transitions to give you the smoothest slideshow experience available. At the very heart of this slider is its layered design that enables you to have 3D like slideshows. Easy to use interfaces enable you to create your slideshows in a WYSIWYG manner which include live previews, drag and drop slider builder, etc. The plugin supports responsive layouts, multiple layouts and touch screen gestures to ensure that your slideshow experience is the same regardless of device. Layer slider is SEO friendly allowing you to build semantic markup with custom attributes that search engines can index easily.

Slider PRO

This fully responsive and mobile ready slider plugin in comes with 150+ options to help you set-up your very own slideshow. The plugin allows you to dynamically load content from your content. Slider PRO also enables you to add animated or static layers into your slideshows to create 3D like slides. The plugin uses a user friendly media loader to enable easy population of content into your slideshows. Slider PRO offers 100+ transition effects which can be optimized into hundreds of possible variations.

Touch Carousel

This slider plugin was created with mobile devices in mind. Touch carousel enables touch navigation on iOS, Android and Blackberry devices. Over 20 settings are available to control speed, layout and slideshow. Touch carousel allows you to slide any post type including WooCommerce and Jigoshop content. You can select content based on taxonomy, popularity or date.

WordPress Themes for Photographers – March 2014

Creating an online portfolio is no longer a challenge nowadays. There are hundreds of options for displaying photographs available to photographers today that give you that expensive professional look. Here are some of the latest WordPress photography themes you can use to show off your prized images:

PhotoReactive – Fullscreen Studio for WordPress

PhotoReactive Premium WordPress Theme is a full screen studio theme for WordPress that photographers will love. This premium theme gives photographers tons of creative options for them to showcase images and other multimedia content both on the homepage and also in the portfolio pages. Full screen slideshows options include touch swipe capability, captions (with or without), photo wall, YouTube and Vimeo videos, static image, and the popular Kenburns slideshow (with or without audio). This theme is also equipped with Ajax & normal portfolio showcases, WooCommerce functionality to help you set up your own photography shop and it is also WPML ready (includes .po .mo language files.)

Devendo Photography WordPress Theme

Devendo Premium WordPress Theme is a flat and modern portfolio theme suitable for photographers. This premium theme is built with Bootstrap 3, is 100% responsive and is also available in four color schemes that can be changed in the theme’s options panel. Key features include: smart overlay search function, integrated social sharing, responsive mega menus with Bootstrap grid inside dropdowns, full screen portfolio with direction aware hover effects, smooth scrolling AJAX-powered horizontal blog, among others.

Fidelity – Premium Photography WordPress Theme

Fidelity Premium WordPress Theme is a modern photography theme with a future-oriented design targeted primarily for photographers but can also be used by design agencies, architecture bureaus, etc. This premium theme takes a full advantage of the latest CSS3 hardware-accelerated transitions (with a fallback to jQuery animations) giving users incredible performance on diverse platforms like desktops, tablet PCs and smartphones. Some of the unique features include: the ability to set up narrow or full width page in a few clicks, the ability to show EXIF data in the portfolio posts, and the horizontal masonry style blog layout that gives you that high end magazine feel. You can also display unlimited slideshows and videos for your background.

The Gentleman – Photography & Portfolio Theme

The Gentleman WordPress Theme is a fully responsive multipurpose theme perfect for any photographer, designer, agency, or any business looking to show off their work. There are multiple homepage layouts, tons of portfolio styles to choose from, and a lot of other features allowing you to build your perfect photography/portfolio website. This theme includes features like: Price tables, team members, multiple blog layouts, preset flat and pattern styles, a powerful theme options panel, multiple sliders including the popular Revolution Slider, multiple portfolio options including the Magnific Responsive Lightbox, and so much more.

Camilla – Horizontal Fullscreen Photography Theme

Camilla Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, minimal, full screen horizontal canvas ideal for displaying your photographs the way you intended them to be seen. This theme’s minimalistic design shifts the focus to your work with the use of distraction-free full screen video-ready galleries . Some of this theme’s modern features include: one-page layout, horizontal scroll, vertical scroll sections in horizontal layout, and it is optimized for mobile devices with its swipe navigation feature for smartphones and tablets, etc.

30 Different Content Slider Plug-ins for WordPress

When looking at websites, slideshows and carousels are the best way to present images and this is usually achieved using jQuery. To have jQuery slider galleries or other image presentation on your web page you have to code or download a jQuery slider plug-in and integrate it. Those sliders give effective looks and are very attractive to users.

Here you can see 30 Different content slider plug-in for WordPress. Hope these plug-ins help you…Enjoy!!!

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WordPress 3.5 – New Features to be excited about in 2013

Drumroll please, Elvin Jones is in the house! WordPress house, that is. In keeping with WordPress code naming tradition, the latest WordPress update released – WordPress 3.5 has been named “Elvin” in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, and there is a lot to drum about.

Here are some of the new features that have been updated in WordPress 3.5:

New Media Manager

The Drag and Drop feature is streamlined, fast and easy to use. Creating galleries is faster with inline caption editing capabilities and simplified controls. Insert multiple images at once with Shift/Ctrl+click or insert multiple galleries per post and independently order images as you like.

New Default Theme

Twenty Twelve (2012) theme for WordPress is a simple, flexible and elegant theme with a gorgeous open sans typeface. It is currently the default theme for WordPress 3.5. It is mobile friendly, fully responsive and looks great on any device. This theme includes all the latest theme features including a front-page template with its own widgets which you can customize and also set up as a single page.

Favorite Plugin Support

Mark all your favorite or often used plugins in the WordPress Plugin Direcotry and access all of them directly in the Admin Panel>Plugins> Install Plugins page using your WordPress.org user name. This pulls out all your favorite go to plugins and saves a lot of time especially when you are setting up multiple sites.

Admin Enhancements

WordPress 3.5 sports a new Welcome Screen, simpler and easier to use even by WordPress beginners. All the basic tasks are accessible in this new interface – from Getting Started to Writing your First Blog Post to Managing Widgets – user-friendly indeed.

Retina display support

WordPress 3.5 is also Retina-Ready (HiDPI) where many visual elements have been updated and converted to CSS3 elements to support the new displays so that they look good on these higher resolution screens.

Support for Instagram, oEmbed support for SoundCloud and Slideshare

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Great news for Instagram, Soundcloud and Slideshare users as WordPress 3.5 supports these services and it is now easier to integrate them to your site without touching any code.

Link Manager Gone

And its absence will hardly be felt probably. WordPress 3.5 hides the Link Manager by default for new installs but if you truly miss it, this feature can still be enabled via the Link Manager plugin. All sites with existing links are left as is.

XML-RPC is enabled by default

This means better accessibility for screen readers, touch devices, and keyboard users. This feature is also for remote publishing/mobile and easier connection with mobile apps like the Official WordPress iOS app. Those who are using Atom will need to use a 3rd party plugin.

New Tumblr importer

If you’ve been wanting to import your Tumblr content into WordPress for years now is the time to do so. WordPress 3.5 has now made this possible.

Multisites can now be installed and used in the subdirectory

Another improvement in WordPress 3.5 which multisite developers will appreciate is the ability to install WordPress Multisite in the subdirectory and not in the document root.

There’s more under the hood goodness that can be further explored if you want to. Some people wait a while before they install the latest WordPress update to give plugin developers time to update their own plugins. Make sure to backup your files before you do any updates.