One of the ways to beautify the way you present information on your blog is to create slideshows. And if you want to build a quick and easy, but beautiful and functional slideshow for your blog, you should check out SlideDeck
It’s Just A Plugin Away
SlideDeck is available as a jQuery for any websites, and a plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs. Both are available in free Lite and paid Pro versions. In this article, we are going to discuss the free WP plugin.
We’ll start at the search and install routine. I just love how the latest version of WordPress has eliminated all the fuss of installing new plugins and integrated the whole process inside the admin area. Click “Add New” sidebar menu under Plugins.
Perform a search for “SlideDeck” and click on the “Install Now” link from the result.
After the installation process is done, click the “Activate Plugin” link.
And now you are ready for the fun part.
Let Them Slide, Baby
To create a slideshow, scroll down to the lower part of the sidebar menu and expand the “SlideDeck” section. Then click on “Add New“.
The “Add New SlideDeck” page will open. The first thing that you have to do is to give the new SlideDeck a name.
Then you can start creating slides – one slide at a time. The process is similar to writing a blog post: add a title, write the post and insert image(s) and other multimedia objects. When you are finished with one slide, move on to the next one.
During my experiment with the plugin, I found that inserting images does not work as well as it should be. I could upload the images, but they wouldn’t show up at the post. So, my trick is to use the image code from one of the regular blog posts in the HTML mode and change the image URL with the image that I want.
On the right side, you will find the SlideDeck Options. There are few tweaks here, but the most important one would be choosing a skin. From all of the available skins, my personal favorite is the default one.
You can easily re-order the slides by dragging and dropping them. You could also add more slides if you wanted to.
Slides can be inserted into posts or pages easily, but if you want to insert it as part of your theme, copy the code snippet and insert it using theme editor.
After clicking the “Save” button, a notification bar will appear. If you want to directly insert the code into your post, use the shortcut link on the bar.
Inserting The Slide
To insert the slide into a post or a page, create a new post (or page) and write the content. Next, point the cursor to the place where you want the slide to appear and click the “Insert SlideDeck” button from the “SlideDeck“menu in the right sidebar.
Alternatively, you could also use the “SlideDeck” button in the toolbar. But please note that this button only appears when you are editing in the “Visual” mode.
You will be asked to choose which slide that you want to insert and the dimensions of the slide.
When you are done with your editing, click the “Publish” button.
And this is what the slide looks like with the standard skin. Visitors can click on the numbers and the content will “slide” open. It’s also possible to navigate using the left and right arrows on the keyboard.
A Smart Way To Slide
There’s another type of slides that you can build. This slide will be dynamic in terms of the content and will always be updated according to the categories that you choose.
After naming the new SlideDeck and choosing how many slides in the sites, choose what kind of post you want to show. The available options are: “Recent Posts“, “Featured Post” and “Popular Posts.”
The last step would be to choose the “Navigation Type“.
After saving the SlideDeck, you can apply it to your theme using the “Theme Code Snippet“.
To see how the SlideDeck would look like, use the “Preview” button.
By far, SlideDeck is one of the coolest WordPress plugins that I’ve ever encountered. You can use it for almost any purpose, ranging from a simple photo slideshow, tutorial, to a multi-dimensional slideshows for product presentation.
And since it’s difficult to really “get” the concept unless you’ve tried it first hand, I suggest you to do just that. Then after that, share your thoughts about the SlideDeck applications using the comment section below.
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