Fancy Slideshows free WordPress plugin

Include beautiful slideshows on your website in an instance Multiple slide sources, including images, posts, pages and links Include slideshows as multi-widgets or in any page or post using shortcode (including TinyMCE Button) Automatic smart cropping of images to fit slideshow container aspect ratio. No time-consuming manual resizing of images required Different transition effects, including carousel slideshows Animated overlays to show off your content Include arrow and button or thumbnail navigations Re-activate WordPress Link Management System Featured images for posts (post-thumbnail) Easy customization of slideshows Addition of slide sources through wordpress filter Exclude the chosen slideshow links category from the WordPress internal links widget Credits The plugin uses the jQuery Cycle2 Plugin The icons were designed by Yusuke Kamiyamane (http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/) Known Issues The slideshow is powered by the jQuery Cycle2 Plugin, which does not work together with version 1 of the plugin. HowTo Include fancy slideshows on your website in an instance. The plugin offers different sources for generating slideshows including links, images or posts Links Create at least one category and add links including Image Address Choose corresponding links category as source Images The plugin enables media galleries Upload images and add the desired images to a gallery Choose corresponding image gallery as source Posts/Pages Add featured images to posts or pages Choose corresponding posts or pages category as source In addition to the featured image, post title (slide title) and an excerpt (slide description) are displayed above linking to the post. This can be also customized through a post meta box Additional Slide Sources Probably a unique feature of the plugin is the possibility of adding additional external slide sources. It allows easy generation of slideshows from virtually any source and involves two wordpress filters. The first step is to add slide sources to the selection menu add_filter( “fancy_slideshow_sources”, “my_slideshow_sources” ); function my_slideshow_sources( $sources ) { $sources[‘mysource’] = array( “title” => “Source Title”, “options” => array( array( “value” => “mysource_ID”, “label” => “Option 1” ), … ) ); return $sources; } This function has to add a multi-dimensional array to the already existing sources. The $sources[‘mysource’][‘options’] array will be converted to an optgroup with label $sources[‘mysource’][‘title’]. The structure of the value field has to have the structure indicated, i.e. mysource_ID. It can be also extended at the end with further fields separated by _ which will be used to break the value into different fields. The second step is to add a function that retrieves the data and sets up the slides data. add_filter( “fancy_slideshow_get_slides_<*mysource*>“, “get_my_slides” ); You see that the filter has the mysource part included, which has to match the primary array key in the function my_slideshow_sources. function get_my_slides( $source ) { $source_ID = $source[1]; // Do some stuff to get slides data … $slides = array(); foreach ( $results AS $result ) { $slide = array( “name” => $result->name, “imageurl” => $result->image_url, “imagepath” => $result->image_path, “url” => $result->url, “url_target” => ”, “link_class” => ‘thickbox’, “link_rel” => ”, “title” => $result->name, “slide_title” => $result->name, “slide_desc” => “” ); $slides[] = (object)$slide; } return $slides; } The above function gives a representative example of how the return array for each slide has to look like. The image path is neccessary to allow smart cropping of images. Full width display In order to force full-width display of slideshows simply check the option 100% Width. If you want to have a slideshow span the entire screen width a slideshow width of at least 1500px or even higher is recommended.