Review of the Week – Infinite Slider WP Plugin

In this weeks review I am testing out Infinite Slider WordPress Plugin. Infinite slider is similar to a banner or banner slider, which displays content that encourages visitors to click on a blog post. The difference with Infinite Slider will display tiles, of varied sizes, of your WordPress Posts or Pages along with the feature image, title and excerpt. With lot’s of customisations you can finely tune it to blend it into your WordPress blog.

Why Choose Infinite Slider

• Unique animated design
• Built up from special small pictures thumbnail grid
• Slider built from random blocks of different sized thumbnails to achieve special outlooks that is always different
• Highlighted central picture/focus block
• Unhighlighted thumbnails have a cover effect, that is cleared on mouse hover for that one small picture only
• Infinite horizontal sliding (the Infinite Slider rebuilds itself infinitely behind the scenes)
• Animated Slide left or right using arrows
• Thumbnails and their blocks jumping into focus with an animation on click
• Slide by grabbing and dragging the whole slider
• On mobile devices swipe the slider
• Different theme options to set the style of the grid and the cover effect of unhighlighted thumbnails
• Full wordpress integration to display the slider using your existing or newly added featured images and their post data (title, description)
• Central picture turns into a link for that particular wordpress post where it is the featured image
• Animated cover texts on thumbnails and the central picture in the focus (post titles and descriptions)
• Fullsize view of central picture on click
• Animated autoslide with adjustable timer
• Fully responsive, the Infinite Slider fills out the screen up to retina view width while also adjusts to below 300px small mobile screens
• Wide selection of fonts and font settings for the cover texts (Google Fonts, 650+ fonts!)
• Many adjustable options to customize your version of the Infinite Slider (filter based on custom post type, categories, tags and many many more features)
• Animated snap to place after drag/swipe

Infinite Slider – On Test

When installing Infinite Slider it recommends that you install the plugin force regenerate thumbnails. This regenerates your images to enable them to work with the slider. I highly recommend using the regenerate plugin before adding the slider to your theme or in a blog post/page as the slider may not even show up.

As with many plugins Infinite Slider comes with many configurable options in a handy administrative screen. The slider options allows you to turn off or change the style of the grid, set the speed of the animation and timer for auto sliding, turn off the cover effect and texts, change the word count of the title and descriptions. You can also add Google fonts and change the colours and style.

Once you have configured the Slider to suit your requirements you can start to add it to your blog. I highly recommend that you test it out in a draft post/post first before making it visible to users. Simply add the shortcode to your post or page

[infinite_slider]

If you have all your featured post images setup correctly you shouldn’t encounter any problems. If you appear to have lots of black tiles where images should be you will need to change or add featured images. Thankfully there is a handy plugin Quick Featured Images that makes the process much quicker or you can of course use the manual method. If you want to add it to your theme simply add the following to your theme template.

<?php echo do_shortcode( '[infinite_slider]' );?>

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