Sliders are something present in nearly all the websites homepages. Smart Slider 3 is a robust free and paid Slider of a product.
The main features of this plugin
As a feature, it offers among others:
- An intuitive user interface
- A drag-and-drop page builder that is visual in nature and has a real-time preview/8.
- Dynamic slides that could be created with the help of articles and filtered by ID, or custom pages.
- Creating slides (generated dynamically) of all types of social nets (Facebook, Dribbble, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and others).
- Sliders that can be customized to control.
The background animations are sliding ( Ken Burns )
Free vs. Premium
In case you simply need a simple slider, then the Smart Slider 3 can be found at ammarmanzar.com. Even the free version is remarkable and original as against some other sliders.
An individual single-site license is available at the lowest cost of just 25 dollars ( renewal is 15 dollars).
The differences between the free and premium versions concerning content and features are some of the highlights. The premium one includes the following:
- The infinite dynamic slide producer.
- Advanced commands
- An expert mode
- Background animations
- An image viewer and editor
Tutorial: Creating a Basic Slider
Unless you have already successfully installed WordPress before, you can refer to How to Install a WordPress Blog in 7 Steps and How to Find, Install, and Activate a WordPress Theme on Your Blog.
After the activation of the Slider Smart plug-in, the WordPress module installs its menu at the bottom of the WordPress management panel.
Suppose that you have never installed a WordPress plugin, go through How to Install a Plugin in WordPress.
To get to the Smart Slider menu, the principal menu that appears in which you will first of all notice a vast green button:” Create Slider “); this brings up an initial configuration window as shown below.
Here, you may give your slider a name as well as a general style. The choice of styles is quite impressive (full-width, full-page, carousel, thumbnail, among others), but we will use a block slider as it is a part of our current design of the website Also Focus How to Make Your Slider Responsive.
Clicking on create then Slider Smart will commence on designing your simple slider template. In a couple of seconds, you will be introduced to a page that will be giving you the basic information about the plug in.
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The very first thing that can be paid attention to here is the section Publish Slider. When you have to publish your slide ( #1 below), you will have to use one of the three options ( Shortcode, Page or Post editor, or PHP code ). And we cannot do that before we make slides.
This is where the easiness of use of the plug-in comes in instead.
All you have to do is to press the green button with the text of the slide of Add Image ( 2 below ) and your media library will appear open. You may then choose as many images as you desire or just one and then press the button of the media library titled as Select.
Note: You cannot be restricted to the pictures in choosing your slide. Video or article can be used as well and it is possible to create blank and static and even dynamic slits.
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Smart Slider puts your slide into the interface and you are all set to save and publish or begin editing. But whenever I post my slideshow, it works only to be not exactly what I wanted the way you can see it in the picture below.
To correct this, I selected the “Size” menu and remained down to the “Responsive Mode” section. The option was “Fullwidth,” hence I selected “Auto” and saved my progress. At that point, I rescanned a right-middle location to the so-called General tab.
By ease of use here, I refer to the fact that the initial time I dealt with it required less than five minutes.
Now it is time to write about the slide itself. In the viewport, you can hover your slides so that you find a green box presented in the upper terminus once you do it. As you could have guessed, when you click it, the first slide in the series has been established.
Moreover, read the post 5 great premium WordPress plugins to include a slider
My slider was already made, and the background was ready, so it was time to include some content and transitions. To achieve this, I just clicked on the slide that I preferred to edit which brought me to the layer section.
The right-hand panel has numerous personal settings, yet, as you scroll down, you will see the picture of your slide. When you are ready, you could simply select any of the items in the left side panel and place it on your slide.
It is an entirely different game developing these slides. The choice of options is so numerous. To provide an idea of the flexibility of this plugin, look at what the each component can add to your slider using:
- A menu of the article
- Animations
- Layer settings
In every of these menus we have several submenus. As an illustration, making a text element, you are able to manipulate font preferences like:
- Police families
- The color of the text
- Font size
- The height of the line
- Text decoration
- The alignment
- Spacing of letters and words
- Text Edit Settings
- The shadow of the text
Every text slider on your slider can have its own distinct settings, distinct animations and even distinct settings in terms of timing. Even there is a Custom CSS section.
As you include elements and animations to your slide, you will also find out a calendar option on the pro version that enables you to regulate the time of display of every particular element as well as the length of their animations using simple slide bars.
I was using this feature in the process of adding various layers on this slide a little later.
Adding layers & animations
Now that we have our slider and the background, it is time to add some variety to it by adding several elements and layers. We shall begin with an image of a snowman added on the slide. To do it I seek out the Menu of Layers in the top and put a click on Image. It will be a maintains a standout picture in the slide.
Once more, also see How to configure the WordPress Slider Revolution webpage
There you can also get by clicking on the dummy picture on the bottom left and to select and resize the image on the media library.
After picking and fitting my image and resizing it, now it is time to add some basic animation and this can be achieved in few steps.
The one is to choose the tab of Animations as shown below. After doing this, we will press the green button which is the In animation.
It is on the next screen where I will be able to select my animation as well as adjust the timeline. In this specific slide, I am adding the option of a right divide and making the animation last more time at 2200 ms.
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I’m also going to add a 300ms delay. Below this screen, one can specify an event and trigger of this animation, so it can trigger on a mouse hover or a mouse click in the slide. These settings are not the aspect on which I will make the example complicated.
Next, I’m going to add some text. Repeat the same steps as above then choose the option of adding a text and adjust it according to the needs. I typed the text, and then adjacent to it, I changed the font settings under which I adjusted the font size and color.
I fix a Fade In animation, and I align the accent to such a manner that it begins immediately after the snow man animation finishing.
You also see here in this menu that there would be an option to make certain tablets and mobile devices to have specific text. It is an excellent illustration of the kind of functionality that enables this plugin to be very versatile and easy to use.
I would have had to resort to a media query, and a custom CSS, in some other sliders.
Finally, I add two more layers. The initial one is a text layer and the latter is an image layer. Once again I undergo the same procedure as in the first one, but I adjusted the animation metric slightly. The final results can be observed below.
Overall, the process of making this slide took 20 minutes.
Note: To convert this slide into GIF some timing of the beautiful animations that I have so carefully assembled would be changed.
There you have it! I must admit that I have tested a number of free and paid WordPress slider, and I believe that it is the best I have ever tried. It is not merely a particular feature that makes it unique. It consists of various things that demonstrate how a great and a mere excellent plug-in it is.
Worth mentioning is the fact that I have not discussed all the individual features.
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I can also guarantee that with a bit more time spent working with this plugin, I would discover a number of things that I would wish to amend and perhaps even a few bugs to find. I believe this ease of usage is because it makes people stay long enough to ultimately utilize the plethora of capabilities available in it. And have I say, there are plenty of them.
