Clunky and Error Prone

I was happy to find a slider that actually had captions in the control tabs, but after trying to work with it for an hour I decided it wasn’t any better than simply hard-coding a slider in the site.

It’s the user interface; it honestly needs to be scrapped and replaced entirely. It’s counter-intuitive and hard to use. I’m a theme developer, if it’s hard for me to use it would be impossible for my clients. Here’s some specific problems:

1) Image uploader doesn’t use WordPress media uploader, so you can’t add an image that’s already in your media library.

2) It doesn’t allow you to do basic things like specify the dimensions of your slider or images, that’s controlled by skins.

3) Changing skins on a slideshow is a ridiculous process – you have to save your slider before you can change the skin. Then, after you change the skin it asks if you’re sure, then once you save it, it disables the slideshow so you have to re-enable it and save it again. Then each skin can have different fields to fill in. After changing skins my captions were lost and I had to put them in again. Once skin kept giving me field errors when I tried to save, after trying everything, I was finally FORCED TO DELETE THE ENTIRE SLIDE GROUP, making me start back at the beginning.

4) There are no directions on how to add your slide to your site, you have to come back to the WordPress.org plugin listing for that info.

If you are power user and up for making your own skin you might get some use out of this plugin, otherwise don’t bother.