So many carousel slider solutions out there, it makes your developer’s brain hurt. Add into the equation content management systems and you’ve got commercial plugins, open-source slider solutions, the list goes on. It’s dizzying. Don’t get me wrong, SliderRevolution is an extremely powerful tool for developing responsive dynamic slider features. It’s perfect for sites and clients that want access to powerful tools that they can maintain and customize themselves. But sometimes, getting everything and the kitchen sink is too much for our clients to handle. If there’s a strict design guideline to follow, these types of solutions then lend themselves to allow users to be able to customize and include additional fonts, features that may not be aligned with the guidelines.
Creating a bulletproof slider that allows the end client to maintain a unique slideshow in some ways is much more complicated. Javascript libraries, Advanced custom fields, and my favorite Repeater field for ACF. With a combination of these, you can roll your own locked down slider/carousel solution that provides a user friendly workflow for your clients to maintain a powerful graphic solution.
Most recently, we’ve been using Slick! by JQuery wiz, Ken Wheeler. Ken is certainly proud of his work as he should be, he calls Slick, “… the last carousel you’ll ever need”. I don’t think Ken is far off here. Single, multiple, responsive, adaptive height, dynamic, variable widths, center mode, lazy loading… the list of customizations and options is a perfect solution that can accommodate any carousel design you can imagine.
Not surprisingly, another dev has created a wordpress plugin that incorporates Ken’s JQuery plugin. We tend to create unique custom post types, and custom fields to incorporate carousel functionality, but the WP plugin is a definite good option for straightforward dev solutions that are probably much simpler than your super-powered commercial Slider Revolution.
