Wow REALLY minimalistic

Being a minimalist, and needing a replacement for a slider plugin now abandoned, I found this plugin – and reading the description I thought “Wow, sounds great”.

And it is. After installing it (it’s a small but non-trivial learning curve to use) I downloaded and unpacked the source. I could hardly believe my eyes! One PHP file, 8.665 bytes; and one CSS file, 1.429 bytes. That’s IT. And btw it’s really well written, the author is obviously a good, modern programmer.

The sliders are custom ‘tags’, the slider images are custom posts (I think). Strange is, that you have to supply a ‘Featured Image’ and an image link for each slide, then it works – slides shown in the order of their creation. Just change the creation date to modify the order (untried).

One thing I found not so obvious in the UI at first: On hover over the slider then a ‘paused’ icon is displayed top left and the slider is indeed paused. As soon as the mouse goes away, the icon disappears and the animation continues. But at first I thought the paused icon was a button to click to cause a pause, and since it did not I thought the plugin was broken. Silly me, but perhaps there is a way to do it even more clearly?

It is now live on the homepage of a german apothecary.

BTW minimalists might want to pair this with WP Featherlight as a lightbox.

5 stars really well earned – thanks Jonathan!