Good, but not great

It’s clear that a lot of thought and effort went into this plugin, I have no qualms at all with the fact that the ‘free’ version is very limited and that for many of the advanced features one must upgrade to the ‘premium’ version – after all, those that work hard on creating great plugins should earn something for their efforts.

However, I spent several weeks testing this plugin and gave a great deal of thought to how many stars it deserves – I would have gone with 4 except that, when compared to other ‘free’ slider plugins, this one lacks what is, IMHO, the most basic (and most important) of features, which is some flexibility to modify the slider’s text layer – the part that displays a Post’s title and (if desired) an excerpt over the image…it isn’t editable at all. Without that, this plugin will leave a lot of folks unhappy unless they pay to use the premium version, so for a “free” plugin, I can only give it three stars.

The problem with the inability to edit the text layer is two-fold — both in terms of content (it comes default with the post title and excerpt (oddly labeled ‘post_content’ rather than ‘post_excerpt’) so if you want to show only the post title, or some other custom field, you’re out of luck – you can’t change or remove those fields nor add others), and in terms of CSS — while it DOES include a Settings section for custom CSS, the construction of the slider itself does not use correctly structured semantic HTML and CSS in order to be able to do so – each image and text layer in the slider is wrapped in DIVs containing both unique CSS classes and unique ID’s making it difficult — albeit not impossible for those experienced with CSS — to target them with custom CSS, and nary a H(eading) tag (for the post title) or paragraph tag (for the excerpt) in sight …this is very frustrating and attempting to add custom CSS is definitely NOT for those who are not expert at CSS.

If all you want is to slap on a Post Slider and NOT mess with the text layer in any way, this plugin might work for you. If you’re looking for more style or content flexibility, you can upgrade to the paid version, or try a better free slider plugin such as WP Responsive Recent Post Slider.

• This topic was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by TrishaM.