It has been one week since I released Meteor Slides and I have been getting a lot of great feedback.
Nearly 600 people have tried out Meteor Slides so far which is just awesome, thanks everybody! If anyone uses my plugin on a live site, be sure to leave a comment with a link, I’d love to see it in action.
A couple of sharp-eyed users have spotted bugs in my plugin and were kind enough to report them. If you spot any more bugs, please let me know.
Meteor Slides Bugs
There were two bugs that I have fixed and released updates for.
Meteor Slides 1.0.1
The first was because I had added a specific position to the slide post type using menu_position. This was conflicting with the position of another plugin. I had assumed that WordPress would automatically resolve these conflicts by sorting the menu items alphabetically or something.
I was wrong, it just doesn’t add one of the plugin menus. I removed this menu position from Meteor Slides and it resolved the conflict. I’m not sure what value menu_position has if it doesn’t play nice with other plugins, so I’m just going to avoid using it.
Meteor Slides 1.0.2
The other bug that I ran into was with the loop that the slideshow uses to display the slides. The loop works fine with the template tag, but the shortcode, which uses the same loop, was having problems.
I checked out a few tutorials on adding a loop within a loop using a shortcode and I learned that echo and other techniques insert the contents of a shortcode above the post or page’s content. Thanks to Chris Coyier, I learned that I need to use return to get the shortcode’s contents placed properly. The loop within a loop was also giving me problems, one loop seemed to be bleeding into the next, I added wp_reset_query after the interior loop like Chris’ tutorial and the bleeding stopped.
Aside from bugs, I have also heard from a few people who had some confusion about how to use Meteor Slides, or add a slideshow to their site. Some of the plugin’s functionality, like the featured image, is fairly new and I’m thinking that some users might not have run into it before.
Meteor Slides Screencast
To make using Meteor Slides clearer, I have recorded a short screencast which explains how to set up Meteor Slides, create new slides, and add the slideshow to your site using the shortcode or template tag.
Can one place the short code for a set of slides in a normal post to serve as some post image, only be a slide show of images for some article?
Yes, you can add the slideshow to a post with the shortcode. But the plugin currently supports just one slideshow.
Hi Josh,
Thanks for the great plugin, its exactly what I’ve been looking for.
I’m having some issues when it loads though, it’s showing a black border only on the top and left sides of each slide… Is there a way to remove this, or to change its colour?
Hi Ty, thanks for checking out Meteor Slides. Looks sharp with the slides that you made.
You can get rid of that border by adding this rule to your stylesheet:
.slide img { border: none; }I think the themes that I tested my plugin with must have been using a CSS reset to zero out the borders, maybe I should add a basic stylesheet to the plugin to make sure that it is more consistent.
Right on the money. Thanks much!
Thank you, thank you, thank you. http://www.beyondtheframe.com.au
I was told I had to make a website, and WordPress seemed the easiest since I know nothing about CSS, PHP, FTP, and most other acronyms to do with this sort of thing… So I really appreciate your plugin and your clear instructions!
You’re very welcome Melissa. The photos that you’ve added to your slideshow are just awesome!
Thanks for your great plugin!!! The first slideshow plugin that works as it should.
Right now I’m working on a Thematic child theme. The problem is that the subpages from the horizontal menu disapear under the meteor slideshow. Is there a way to solve this problem? Have a look at http://stinzenlaan.nl/wplab/
THX,
G
Cool, glad Meteor Slides is working out for you!
Sounds like you are having a problem with layers. If you set the z-index of your dropdowns it should work fine:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/416621
THX Josh,
It was indeed the Z-index. I played with it before I asked you with no results. But I found the solution. Setting the containing slider div to “relative” and Z-index to “1”
Your plugin rocks!!!!
No problem, I’ll make sure the next version takes care of that for other users.
Hi Josh,
Bit of a long shot… but I’ll take a chance and ask anyway!
Watched your presentation to see if your plugin could solve an issue for me. Can’t see that it does in the present form, so just in case you’re looking for ideas…
I need a daily slideshow on my surf report site. It needs to sit at the top of the page and only to show pics with a specific prefix in the filename. At midnight every day the slideshow stops accepting new images but otherwise continues to be visible. When the first picture of the next day is posted, a new slideshow group starts, and the previous day’s collection is archived (but still accessible via a link on the page). You can see how it works at my website right now. (Problem is WP3 breaks my current slideshow system, so I’m now looking about for other options.)
Hi Don, that sounds like a pretty cool slideshow feature you have on your site.
Meteor Slides currently only supports one slideshow. I’m planning to support multiple slideshows in a future version, but I don’t think you would be able to pull that off without adapting it a bit.
You could actually use just one slideshow if it was setup to only load slide posts from that current day, and then old slides would not be loaded at all. The archive would be a bit tricky, but you should be able to do something dynamic where you choose the date and it loads a slideshow with slides from that day.
How are you currently doing it, with a plugin or something custom in your theme?
Hi again Josh,
The guy who built my theme also built a slideshow plugin for me. Unfortunately for me his university career takes precedence over upgrading the plug in so that it can co-exist with WP3. As I understand it, he had to do a few tricks to get the slideshow to behave in all the ways I wanted (it pre-loads images for instance). From what he says, WP has moved on sufficiently that he’d pretty much need to re-do the plug in.
I don’t know if you are interested in custom work, but if so, I’d be happy to submit a spec for a quote. (Also I would not care if any such work was then incorporated into the plugin and released under whatever licensing you wanted.)
cheers,
Don
Sure Don, you’re welcome to email me the specs, a copy of the old plugin would also give me a better idea of what you need.
Very good start on your plugin. I found out about it from one of my theme users who wants a rotating site header image using my theme. I do allow header html injection, and by filtering that through do_shortcodes, magically you can use your plugin as a great header image rotator!
But – I would like an option to specify the meteor area (just like now), but to not have the auto-cropping of images (I changed the size of the area, but all the images I had uploaded were cropped to the wrong size by then, so had to reupload everything). I think this might then allow multisized images in the slideshow as long as the main size is as big as the largest slide.
But I’m going to include a reference to your plugin as a good way to rotate header images from within my theme.
Yeah, I’m working on some themes I want to release and I am planning on adding some styling and the template tag for Meteor Slides, so if they install the plugin it will just automagically work for them.
Are you referring to how the featured image is automatically cropped, or how the CSS crops the slideshow if there are slides that are larger than the dimensions in the settings?
I could probably add an option for this, how exactly do you want it to work? I’m thinking it would look best if the slides were all a specific width, but the height could vary depending on the images used.
Thanks Bruce for supporting my plugin with a reference, it’s much appreciated! I’ll have to check out your 2010 Weaver theme.
hey mate, your plugin seems to be exactly what im looking for… still, after installation i create my slideshow, save it – and then its always “not found”, i click on “slides” … it says no slides found 🙁 any help please?
That’s a strange problem. So you are able to add a slide, but then it disappears right away?
You are using WordPress 3.0 correct? Could you tell me what theme you are using, and any other major plugins?
ok sorry mate, i found the mistake. every slideshow NEEDS a title… i left that one out cause i was afraid it shows up on the slideshow where i didnt want any text. sorry. solved 😀 and thanks again for this awesome plugin, gonna mention you in the imprint 🙂
Cool, glad you got it figured out. I’ll add that to the FAQ in case someone else has the same problem.