Carousel for WordPress

I'm looking for a carousel (aka gallery, slider) widget to integrate into a WordPress (WP) based site.

Found lots, mostly jQuery based. Some even as WP plugins.

Requirements

  1. Administration: easy editing of the gallery, content management integrated into WP's admin interface, no external tools.
  2. Lazy loading of images: high quality photos, to be displayed one at a time, so avoid delaying showing the page till all finish loading. AJAX, maybe.
  3. Clean design: no thumbnails, no decorations; hide controls unless hovered over. If provides captions, slide them in only when hovering. If animated, do it intuitively. Quiet transitions.
  4. Quality: code is efficient, well organized, etc.

Interesting

  1. carouFredSel, version 5.4.1; jQuery plugin
    • 30KiB minified. Looks very flexible.
  2. Dynamic Content Gallery (DCG), version 3.3.5; WP plugin
    • Fade transitions, transparent captions slide in, fading scroll buttons inside frame, uses jQuery (or SmoothGallery with Mootools). Elaborate (convoluted?) administration interface. Also as WP widget.
    • Documentation, a guide, FAQ, and a forum.
  3. Easing Slider, version 1.2; WP plugin; jQuery
    • Requires specifying URLs of images — flexible, but very unfriendly.
  4. Featured Content Gallery, version 3.2.0
  5. Featured Post Slideshow
    • Not a plugin. Article explains implementation. Fade out transition/animation. Doesn't cycle automatically?
  6. Front Slider
  7. jQuery Carousel
  8. JSOR
  9. Nextgen Gallery: flash based. Yuck.
  10. Simple Galleria 1.0.1
  11. TheThe Image Slider 1.1.6
  12. Wordousel: jFlow based
    • Shows entire posts (excerpts?), not just thumbnails.
  13. WP Carousel, version 0.5.3
  14. WP Easy Slider
  15. WP Orbit Slider 1.0
  16. XEN Carousel, version 0.12.2; WP plugin
    • Requires calling xencarousel_output() in templates. Seems uses images explicitly assigned in posts/pages; inconvenient management.
    • Uses Easing (a jQuery plugin) and several others (for metabox?).

Uninteresting

  1. Accordion Image Menu — not a carousel; otherwise very nice.
    • Cf demo, version 2.0
    • Accordion: sliver of each image always in view, captions.
    • WP plugin, used as shortcode, rich API.
  2. Carousel Gallery — draws ellipse of thumbnails, 3D like carousel. Cf demo.
  3. Carousel Gallery (jQuery) (CGJ), released 2010-04-21
    • WP plugin, gallery shortcode, jCarousel
    • Works with WP's gallery shortcode, which renders a gallery out of the images attached to a page.
    • Demo (updated 2010-01) and some discussion (in comments).
    • Code looks horrible! Generated JavaScript with dynamic function names? WTF?
  4. SmoothGallery: Mootools based.
  5. Superb Slideshow: slides listed manually in an XML file — WTF?
  6. Vertical Carousel Slideshow: animated like rotating cube. XML again?
  7. Zen-Carousel: Dojo based.

…

Installing

  1. Local (LAN) site: unpack a WP plugin in /var/www/$SITE/wp-content/plugins/.
  2. On WebFaction: unpack in ~/webapps/$APP/wp-content/plugins/. With KDE: from Ark, or the downloaded package's context menu, simply extract it over SSH to, eg, fish://user@host/var/www/site/wp-content/plugins.

Notes

(None.)

(Appending notes disabled temporarily.)

Last modified 2012-01-10 13:49:45 +0000