laconic

@jb15, the sydney theme already uses the superslides plugin so no extra install was needed, but yes I did need to make some modifications in a child theme to get the problem resolved. The sync problem goes away because rather than use two plugins (what the sydney theme does by default) for the sliders, the changes make it so you only use the one and therefore they won’t get out of sync. Let me know if you run into issues with the steps and want some help.

The superslides slider plugin (https://github.com/nicinabox/superslides) used for the images works fine with text also as shown in their demo. So rather than use two approaches, I just switched to using superslides for both the image and text and no longer have the out of sync problem.

In a child theme, copy the function sydney_slider_template() from the original sydney/inc/slider.php to functions.php for the child theme. Get rid of the text-slider-section div and move the h2/p text blocks into the if’s for each of the images. Instead of using “contain” class for the div rename it to “text-slider” to pick up the existing css for styling. I needed to add some css for positioning but otherwise worked fine.

.text-slider {
  width: 100%;
  margin: 0 auto;
  position: absolute;
  top: 40%;
  text-align: center;
}

See the codex for information on proper use of wpdp->prepare with php variables: https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Class_Reference/wpdb