vSlider Plugin: Create A WordPress Slideshow Under 3 Minutes

The beauty of vSlider WordPress plugin is that after installation the setup is so simple that it really does not have to take more than 3 minutes to get it working.

Set the slideshow size, set the speed, set the animation, set the number of slides and which category you wish to pull the first image of the post from, edit or accept the default CSS … that is it! No monkeying around with editing custom fields!

Alternately you can choose “Custom Image Settings” and enter up to 5 URL’s pointing to images … if you don’t wish to pull from a certain category.

What’s great: you don’t have to fiddle with custom fields (major pain) like Featured Content Gallery requires to and you don’t have to worry about browser compatibility issues or bloated code. vSlider is jQuery based meaning what it needs to run on is already built into WordPress.

The simple admin page (no you don’t even have to touch your posts to get started):

There are several WordPress slideshow plugins available each with different levels of setup difficulty and features.

If you are interested in simply rotating a few images WITHOUT THE TEASER OF THE POST APPEARING and do not wish to invest a lot of time into this project, vSlider WordPress plugin is great.

Let’s talk about one feature that is “missing”: there is no option to display those familiar Featured Content Gallery type post teasers. Let’s see the difference:

I personally can live without the teasers and just present a clean slideshow; the lightness of the code and the quick setup is most important for me. In a way the lack of text on the photo creates some mystery.

This is the code to embed into your theme:
<?php if (function_exists(’vSlider’)) { vSlider(); }?>

vSlider Plugin Tips

1.) You can even embed the above code into your 404.php template and create a visually inviting 404 page.

2.) You can only pull images from one category at a time but there is a way to bypass this limitation.
If you would like to pull images from more than one category what I would recommend is that you create a new category named i.e. “slideshow”.

Now assign all those posts to this “slideshow” category from any current categories which you wish to pull images from. But keep these posts in their original category as well.

Now select the “slideshow” category on the vSlide admin page to pull images from! In the future you can customize the content of your slideshow by adding or subtracting posts from this new “slideshow” category.

Optional: if you wish to take this one step further and you don’t want search engines to crawl this new “slideshow” category and consider it duplicate content just add this (or your version) to your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /category/slideshow/http://www.vibethemes.com/vslider-wordpress-image-slider-plugin/