I recently worked on a client project and one of the specifications in the design brief was a featured posts slider on the main page, this didn’t seem a major feat to me and decided to go with the WordPress-ers most used motto “There is a plugin for that.”
Now this statement was true in the extreme, there are so many plugins like this my task was to actually find a really good plugin to do the job as many I tried and tested were not up to the task.
So I decided to share my findings with you all to hopefully save you some time and save you sitting looking at endless plugins like I did a few days ago! I can’t tell you what is best for your site that unfortunately is up to you, I have given you a brief description of each and you can follow the “Read More & Download” links for more information on each of the plugins.
Front Slider
Front Slider shows an unlimited amount of featured posts on your front page, it auto generates the thumbs for each post for its in built thumbnail navigation. It has a number of options for styling and speed, categories, duration etc…
Featured Content Gallery
Featured Content Gallery is by iePlexus and creates an automatic rotating gallery of your posts and pages. Its easy to addon to your WordPress install and only needs a custom field to get the gallery up and running.
WordPress Content Slide Plugin
This is a flexible plugin which has several image effects and has customizable styles you can use to theme it up to your sites design. It only requires a line of code to be added to get the slider to display.
Coin Slider 4 WordPress
Coin Slider is a jQuery powered slider solution for your WordPress install, it uses a custom field for posts you wish to be featured. It has a number of options and can be implemented with a single line of code.
vSlider
vSlider is a tiny (20kb) plugin for WordPress that allows you to display features pages or posts on your blog in the form of a slideshow. Its highly customizable and everything from the CSS to the animation speed can be tweaked and altered.
Featured Posts Slideshow WordPress Plugin
This plugin is a smaller image slider and works better with thumbnails, the thumbs link to the featured posts. It uses a custom field to enable the slider to function and uses a line of PHP to insert it into your theme.
Content Slider by SlideDeck
SlideDeck is an impressive solution for your featured posts, it is extremely flexible and is WordPress 3.0 compatible now. The downside of this plugin in my opinion is the free version I found to be extremely restrictive on what you could do basically forcing you to buy the PRO version if you want it to run how you would like it to. Beside that issue it is a great plugin.
Smooth Slider
Smooth Slider is a very simple but easy to style and use within your blog, the plugin installs quickly and it has the added bonus of using custom posts types and also shortcode and you need to add a custom field like many of the other plugins.