Meteor Slides widget update for WordPress 4.3

Today I released Meteor Slides 1.5.4. This tiny update changes the code for setting up the slideshow widget for WordPress 4.3, which will be coming out soon. This only updates how the widget is added to WordPress and doesn’t change the admin interface for the widget or how slideshow widgets display on the frontend of a site.

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Using WordPress For Project Management

At WordUp Minneapolis 2014 I gave a talk on using WordPress for project management.

In this session I talked about building a simple project management app with WordPress using the P2 theme and a handful of plugins. With this app you can create to do lists, check off those tasks, and mark posts as unresolved or resolved.

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Building Better Widgets

At WordCamp Milwaukee 2014 I gave a talk on Building Better Widgets.

In this session I talked about how to design interesting and useful WordPress widgets. I covered designing for a wide range of widgets, exploring different widget designs, planning responsive widgets that scale well, thinking about animated and interactive widgets, and upgrading your widgets with plugins.

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Create responsive slideshows with Meteor Slides 1.5

Meteor Slides 1.5 adds responsive slideshow support, touch navigation, an improved slideshow widget, new translations, and updates jQuery Cycle.

Responsive Slideshows

I have been building more responsive websites lately and receiving more and more requests from users for responsive slideshows, so I have updated the slideshows to scale automatically.

If you are using a fixed width theme the slideshows will remain unchanged at their original dimensions. But if you are using a fluid or responsive width theme those are used as the maximum dimensions and the slideshow will scale, shrinking to fit the theme on smaller screens and devices.

Any custom slideshow templates, stylesheets, or scripts you are using would have to be updated from the default versions in 1.5 to add this responsive functionality.

Try resizing the Meteor Slides homepage in your browser to see the responsive slideshow in action! Read More

Meteor Slides widget and stylesheet

Meteor Slides has been out for two weeks now and I haven’t heard about any more bugs, so I have started working on adding more features to the plugin. If you do run into a bug, please let me know.

I was really surprised that almost 400 people watched the Meteor Slides screencast that I recorded, I hope that video makes things easier for some users. I will definitely be making some more screencasts related to theme development in the future.

Meteor Slides 1.1

The latest version of Meteor Slides now includes a slideshow widget, an easy to customize stylesheet, and an update for the jQuery Cycle plugin that powers the slideshow. Read More