Dalton Rooney contacted me a few days ago to see if I wanted to try out the improved version of his excellent plugin Portfolio Slideshow Pro. I had been using the free version of his slideshow plugin so jumped at the chance of trying the more advanced copy.
Portfolio Slideshow Plugin Overview
The plugin allows you to easily add image slideshows to any post or page on your site. Adding images to a slideshow is a breeze. All you do is upload your images using the WordPress image uploader. Once you have uploaded the images you can insert a slideshow into your page or post by adding the following code to your page:
How to add Portfolio Slideshow
That’s all you have to do to add the slideshow to your page. The images can also be displayed as slideshows on other pages by adding the page id of the page the images were uploaded to. For example, if I uploaded a gallery to another page, I could add it to this post by inserting the code:
By using the above code I can add the gallery below (the images are attached to another page):
[portfolio_slideshow id=10584]
If you insert the default shortcode into your page i.e. [ portfolio_slideshow ], the way the slideshow is displayed depends on the way you have set the plugin up in the options area. As you can see from the screenshot below, the plugin has a lot of customisation options. The options are split into three main areas: display, behaviour and navigation.
Is Portfolio Slideshow easy to use?
The plugin is incredibly easy to use but Dalton did mention to me via email that there are a lot of features that I might not discover until I’ve had some time to experiment with it. The plugin demo shows you the main types of slideshows you can add. As you can see from the list below, Portfolio Slideshow Pro gives you lots of ways to display your images.
Image display options on Portfolio Slideshow
- Thumbnail Carousel
- Toggle Thumbs
- Basic Thumbnails With Captions
- Centred Slideshow With Captions
- Open Image In Lightbox
- Paper On The Top
- Numbers Pager
- Bullets Pager
- No Nav Or Pager
- Nav On The Bottom
- Graphical Navigation, No Wrap
- Text Navigation
- Auto Play
The plugin is very well documented too with each shortcode attribute explained in the admin area. Dalton also has a detailed tutorial that walks you through how to use the plugin. It illustrates how easy it is to add slideshows using the plugin.
As Dalton predicted, I’ve still not used the plugin enough to understand all of its features. I’ve changed a few things and tried a few different variations of displaying images but haven’t tried anything too adventurous. Since I’ve not had too long to test the plugin, here are the features the plugin sales page notes:
- Upload your images using the built-in WordPress image uploader.
- Drag-and-drop image management.
- Add multiple slideshows to posts and pages with a simple shortcode.
- No Flash—works great on mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android compatible).
- Support for fluid layouts.
- Add file names, captions, and descriptions for each image.
- Modify autoplay timeout, transition style & transition speed.
- Plenty of shortcode options to optionally customize each instance of the slideshow.
- Add a standalone slideshow to any page, post, widget area or template file with our easy to use Slideshow Builder.
- Easily insert the shortcode into your posts using our point-and-click shortcode creator.
- Sidebar widget allows you to add a slideshow to any dynamic widget area of your site.
- Unlimited custom slideshow sizes.
- Text and graphical navigation, above or below the images, or disable the navigation altogether.
- Pager styles: thumbnails, bullets, or numerals, above or below images, or disable the pager altogether.
- Touch/swipe navigation and keyboard navigation.
- Scrolling thumbnail carousel.
- Toggle thumbnails on and off.
- Lightbox integration.
- Audio player integration with our free Haiku HTML5 audio player.
- Customize the number of thumbnails per row, thumbnail sizes, & thumbnail spacing in the settings panel.
- Center slideshows in the post content area.
- Guaranteed quick, personal support in our online forum.
How much does the Portfolio Slideshow plugin cost?
A single site license for Portfolio Slideshow Pro only costs $15. It’s a fantastic plugin and is a great way of displaying images to readers. If you have any questions about how the plugin works, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them. Failing that, I’ll ask Dalton to drop by to answer some queries 🙂
Thanks,
Kevin
Link: Portfolio Slideshow Pro