Top 10 Wordpress Featured Content Slider plugins
Seems like there is a featured posts slider on every Wordpress blog these days and yet it can still be difficult to fond one that suits your needs. The more plugins there are the harder it is to find the best ones. For this post I pulled together a selection that have different features and layouts so you can find the one that does what you need.
SlideDeck
This slider has an unusual layout with the titles stacked vertically on the sides of the slider. There are a lot of customization features including adding media like videos, music and images uploaded right through the slider's admin interface Add your own HTML and CSS to completely control the layout inside the slider and with that CSS you can control fonts, backgrounds but there are skins already set up for you to play with. There is a free version but the paid one allows you to remove branding and have total API control.
DownloadFlash card Slider
Add a horizontal carousel of scrolling flash-cards to a page, post or widgets with code or with short codes or widgets. Each slide can be "flipped" to see the "back side" content. What a fun way to do a quiz or game.! This is a paid plugin, but for under $10 it's a steal.
DownloadFeatured Content Slider
If you're looking for a super-clean interface, the ability to customize the sliding effects, image size and slider dimensions, text colors etc without too many bells and whistles, this is a good choice. The images are pulled from your "featured Image" selector, and you can embed the slider in a post or in a page with a short code.
DownloadSmooth Slider
Use it for featured posts, pages or images in pages or posts. Select the image used in each featured post by the featured post image or select it directly from the post content. You will need to add some PHP to your template for the full features. Because it's written in text and Jscript the text is indexed by search engines, so you get better SEO.
DownloadDynamic Content Gallery
If what you're looking for is something to show off images first and text second, with or without thumbnails, then here you go. This is a classic looking plugin with some nice features behind it. It automatically pulls the first image from a post and can contain as many as 15 gallery images. If you haven't got an image in a post the slider can pull from a gallery of default images. There are a lot of bells and whistles on this one, but there is good support for this plugin through the
Studiograsshopper forums.
DownloadFeatured Articles Lite
Want to run multiple sliders on your pages or posts? Here you go then. The design is clean and the code is light so it's not a huge drain on your users' time. You can change the direction of the slide and you can use this one as a widget too for those featured posts you want to show up in the sidebar or footer. One thing I like about this one is the ability to display post titles on the side or the more usual selection buttons to navigate.
DownloadFeatured Posts Scroll
This is a highly customizable option for a visual slider. You'll need to copy and paste some php into your template to install it in the template, or if you want to use it on a post or page you can use a shortcode. Images are pulled from the featured image section of your page or post .There are good instructions should you want to create your own arrow images to more closely fit your theme.
DownloadFeatured Content Gallery
This one is recommended by some of my favorite theme frameworks including Headway and Studiopress.It's easy to install and gives you the option of adding "featured text" instead of an excerpt. You have three theme styles to set, background, text and border colors are set in the admin panel. You can control display and transition timing in the control panel.
DownloadWP Glideshow
Insert your slider in a post or a page and control the order of display by date or by title as well as sorting ascending or descending. Customize the border, text, sizes, background, layout and sizing. Choose “Feature in WP-Glideshow” and set an Featured Image (“Feature Image” when Editing Post/Page). Use either numbers or dots as your navigation and it automatically re-sizes images.
DownloadListic Slider
Another slider from the dev team at Slidervilla, this paid plugin is a great option for a shopping site or site that has frequent updates. Scrolling carousel of titles with excerpts and a main featured post area. It takes up a fair amount of real estate but it's real content. If you don't like the size you can use just the scrolling content area as a widget.
Download