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As a note, I replaced Smooth Slider with Meteor Slides instead because I don’t need to feature a post, and because I found it to be much more user friendly and lighter. However, if you are looking for a featured posts image slider, the notes below still apply.

I just implemented the smooth slider plugin to my site, and I really like how it turned out for the header. There are a few things I don’t like about it, and I’ll discuss my thorough findings and helpful links below. You can check out Smooth Slider for yourself by visiting the WordPress Smooth Slider plugin page.

Things I LOVE about Smooth Slider

• It works well with an Artisteer generated template.
• It gives you the ability to showcase featured posts easily including text and of course the featured or chosen image from that post.
• It gives you the ability to link each post or imaged featured in the slider to a post, page, or any other link desired.
• Because it includes actual text from the post, it is helpful for SEO.
• It allows you to easily edit the styling of your slider including width, height, image size, font styling, as well as incorporating the slider as an image only slider as well as a text and image slider.
• You can incorporate the slider anywhere on your site and in multiple places on your site.
• It allows you to use a transparent background (what I used for my header slider), and I also was able to change out the arrow images easily with my own design.
• It gives you the ability to use small numbers or custom images thumbnails at the bottom of the slider for simple navigation.
• You can incorporate multiple sliders in your site.

Things I don’t like about Smooth Slider

• You can’t just dump a bunch of pictures into a slider, but each slider image has to be from an actual post or page. This is not convenient if you are looking to use the slider for a design portfolio where you have a lot of images to add to a slider and can be very time consuming. This works great if you just want to highlight some specific posts, though.
• It is not necessarily as user friendly as I’d like it to be as far as incorporating the necessary slider tags into your template. You can find good instructions here, though.
• If you use multiple sliders, you can’t edit the styling of the second or third slider to be different from your original slider. For example, if I were to add another slider to a post page, it would still be as wide and as narrow as my header slider and incorporate the same design. You can create a new style sheet for the slider, but you have to really know your code in order to do this, and again it’s very time consuming.

I’d love to make this plugin work for displaying my portfolio images and linking them to specific posts about each project, and I will keep you posted on what I find as far as editing the slider and adding it to different pages/templates. If you have found more ways to tweak or make use of the slider, please comment and share your wisdom.

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