Over the past few months at WooHQ, we’ve taken many strides towards responsive themes (our newer themes, as well as Canvas, are all responsive). During this time, we acquired FlexSlider, the popular responsive JavaScript slideshow script for jQuery, as well as launched the fully revamped FlexSlider2, written to include a variety of features and enhancements. Amongst all of this, there is one next logical step to take… a responsive WordPress slideshow plugin.
Ladies and gentlemen… we present to you… WooSlider!
What is this “WooSlider” anyway?
WooSlider is a WordPress plugin for easily and quickly creating slideshows of your content. With an easy-to-use integrated shortcode creator, it’s possible to add slideshows directly into the content of your blog posts, pages and other post types you have in your WordPress installation (for example, into the description of a WooCommerce product). Powered by FlexSlider2, these slideshows respond to the screen’s size and scale either up or down appropriately. Pretty neat, right?
What can WooSlider do out of the box?
Out of the box, WooSlider comes bundled with a full settings panel for customising options for all your slideshows (unless you choose to override them for specific slideshows) as well as three slideshow types; “attachments”, “posts” and “slides”. With these bundled slideshow types, it’s possible to quickly create slideshows of the images attached to the current page or blog post (useful for displaying slideshows of gallery images), your recent blog posts (or posts for specific categories or tags) as well as fully customisable slides using our popular “slide” custom post type, which is bundled with several WooThemes themes (these play nicely with WooSlider, never fear).
These three slideshow types come bundled with various options specific to each type, in order to customise the slideshow to suit your needs. Only the relevant options are displayed at any given time, so you won’t be flooded with a list of irrelevant options.
WooSlider aims to stay out of your way until you need it, at which point it springs to life and is at the ready to assist you in adding slideshows as easily and quickly as possible.
My theme already uses FlexSlider… is that okay?
Of course, yes. If your theme already uses FlexSlider, that’s not a problem. WooSlider stays out of the way of your existing FlexSlider script and goes to work focussing only on WooSlider-created slideshows. We’ve tested this across several of our themes that use FlexSlider and have ensured that FlexSlider in the theme and WooSlider play nicely together.
If your theme uses a “slide” custom post type, WooSlider uses that post type for the “slides” slideshow type. This shouldn’t affect your theme at all, as WooSlider doesn’t add or remove any custom fields, nor does it use custom fields for this slideshow type.
What about sliders in existing and future WooThemes themes?
Sliders in existing and future WooThemes themes will be created as always. WooSlider will never be a requirement for upcoming themes and “default” sliders in those themes will always work without WooSlider.
Developer Friendly… with a slideshows API as well
Integrating WooSlider into your theme is as easy as using either the shortcode, the wooslider(); template tag or one of the slideshow widgets made available for displaying your slideshows in any of your dynamic widget areas.
Creating custom slideshow types has also been made possible via our slideshows API, built into WooSlider, for which full documentation has been provided on our WooThemes Knowledge Base. What it comes down to, with the slideshows API is, you let WooSlider know about your new slideshow type and hand it a small array of the content for each slide. WooSlider handles the rest. With this API, the limit to what can be added as a slideshow is only set by your imagination.
All documentation for WooSlider can be found directly in our support desk’s knowledge base.
Oh… just one more thing…
Naturally, we’ve got a few extra aces up our sleeves with this one. In this case, we’ll let the image below do the talking here.
We look forward to seeing how you use WooSlider and what kinds of slideshows you create to showcase your content in a new and exciting way.
About
The plugin is nice, and I don’t mean to be a nag here, but why are you being so sparse with themes lately? I thought we were supposed to get 2 a month?
January – 2 themes
February – 2 themes
March – 2 themes
April – 1 theme
May – 1 theme
June – 2 themes, 1 theme update (Canvas)
July – 1 theme
By my count we’re running 3 themes short this year (2 if you want to count Canvas v5 as a new theme). There’s also seeming to be a lot more focus on WooCommerce lately, with themes for that happening at least 50% of the time, and many of those aren’t really built to be use with other types of sites. Again, I’m not trying to be a nag, but I am also spending money for my subscription at the same time.
They are expanding their skill set. While that is proving successful for them, I agree with you, I am also not happy that themes have taken a back seat since that is the only reason I am a member. Though I am getting a lot of nice stuff I don’t need.
Agreed. I nearly always resort to trawling Theme Forest for my themes these days.
Hi Atnevon and Peter,
Thanks for your feedback on this.
We’ve got a bunch of great themes lined up that function both as conventional WordPress themes as well as WooCommerce-tailored themes. Keep an eye on our blog for more information on these. 🙂
With a few tweaks, our WooCommerce-focussed themes can also be made to function as more CMS-focussed solutions. We’ll explore ways in which we can help to explain how to achieve this with WooCommerce themes, possibly through knowledgebase articles on our support desk.
Since it came up – why not have three plans. One for conventional themes one for WooCommerce one for conventional themes and WooCommerce themes. Personally I am not interested at all in eCommerce themes. Nowadays I have to scan your news if there is anything interesting for me. If it is about WooCommerce I wasted my time and feels like getting interrupted for nothing.
Totally agree with you Georg! I have no interest in WooCommerce and really no interest in different themes each month, I’m more interested in tools and functionality not tied to specific themes.
The new themes each month is great for devs & designers who want to build an arsenal of cheap web designs that they can charge their clients a fortune for, but for everyone else it is of no value – perceived or otherwise!
I myself have gone to Pagelines for a primary “go to” theme solution. While I LOVE the Woothemes “themes” they are too hit or miss, lacking a completely consistent framework underneath.
Honestly? They should really all be “child themes” of a consistent and reliable (expanded) WooFramework. As it is, I cannot assume that the next theme will have any of the core features I love.
What DOES excite me is WooCommerce, WooSlider and WooDojo. These high quality tools work with any theme… and to me that makes them the real core of my WooWorld 🙂
Ken
@Soulhuntre
Pagelines? Oh my… Did you explore a better option? I find it way to restrictive. This is the one that works out of the box and plays better with WooCommerce. Ever thought of unleashing your imagination completely? Then this one is better, be prepared to fall in love though..
http://five15pm.com.au/framework-unleashed
I looked at it… and was less than impressed. The tech looks ok… but I have not seen indications of great support. Woo has spoiled me that way 🙂
I don’t find Pagelines restrictive at all – for the simple reason that I can trivially jump down into the Bootstrap grid that lies underneath it and do anything I want.
Ken
So I took a chance via an Appsumo deal and tried Ultimatum. Got in, looked around the members forums.
Problems with Woocommerce, problems with headers, bugs in the forms module, lack of response to support requests and on and on and on.
Yeah… I’ll stay with Woothemes level support and quality. For now that means a VERY small set of very professional vendors. Woo, Pagelines, Slidedeck, Gravity Forms and Wp-Types.
Ken
Hi Ken, actually the issue with WooCom on it only started since the last Woocom update update, in which you can see problems with a few other themes. I have seen that the developer is patching the theme in the next day or so. The issue with the logo is because they decided it was better to dump timbthumb, in which is being patched in the same time. Of the 4000 members, I see maybe 4-6 unanswered posts. I see resolved posts every day.. I didn’t get mine through Appsumo, I got it from another deal they had running before that one.
I am keen to try Wooslider with This framework, I will advise the results with a link to the site. As for header, there is no issues there, and the forms issue is a few users own settings.
Atnevon / Peter,
We are currently revising & streamlining our themes processes and will be communicating the upcoming changes to those. We will also be discussing these with all club subscribers before publicizing those, as we’d love the feedback of our community before implementing those changes.
Adii
250k users can’t be wrong. Can they?
Keep up the great work! Good talk at WCSF, by the way. You should re-consider hiring my friend, Kat. How many videos do I need to make? 😉
Actually, it’s worse than that from subscriber perspective as one of the June themes (Artificer) is free. It’s a great theme, but doesn’t add value to the subscription.
Club Subscribers do however have access to the support resources for Articifer, something which free users don’t.
We’ve seen time & time again that the biggest value of the club is the support aspect and all of the resources that we can offer our subscribers in this regard.
A new theme is single-use. A new plugin can be used with most (all?) themes.
The WooThemes core theme library is strong and capable. The next logical step is to focus on plugins that enhance *all* themes in the catalog.
I love this strategy, it adds exceptional value to the subscription plan.
Except the plugin isn’t included in the subscription plan!
There is however an ongoing discount available for active club subscribers, which means that you can get all of our plugins (WooSlider & WooCommerce Extensions) at a discount.
There are 150-odd WC extensions these days, which means that club subscribers gets hundreds of potential dollars in savings via this discount. Same goes for WooSlider and other upcoming products.
We know that not all club subscribers use WooCommerce or will need something like WooSlider, but the same goes for any new theme that we can release; not all subscribers will need / want / like that either.
What is the active discount?
When I try to use WCSUB it tells me it can only be used once.
Maire, it is case-sensitive. I only get that error when typing “wcsub.” When I use Upper Case, the discount is applied. Be sure to double check.
Please Share the link of discount I haven’t found
They might be running a few themes short but I’ve noticed the quality of the updates is way better than just an extra themes. They are allowing us to customize woocommerce and themes way more with extra plugins, cool things like wooslider and woodojo which I think make up way more than a few extra themes… my two cents anyway.
Going down to one theme a month is clearly the strategy, the home page has been changed for a while now.
Good observation. I hadn’t noticed that they had changed it since I signed up. You’d think that they would have to notify subscribers of that kind of change before they made it…
Our strategy has definitely evolved since the beginning of the year and we believe that we are no offering more value across the board to our subscribers. Once we have settled on a clear strategy, we will be communicating that to our subscribers and getting their feedback on this.
This may sound harsh to some, but until you have ‘settled on a clear strategy’ and announced that new strategy to your paying subscribers, there’s really no excuse for not delivering on what we signed up for. If you can’t, then you need to start refunding money right away.
I’m not going to sue WooThemes; I’d just walk away long before it got to that, but in legal terms I’m pretty certain that you’ve definitely got a problem here. Every customer that signed up for a subscription package before you changed your site from saying 2 themes a month down to 1 theme a month entered into a contract with you. You’ve now broken that contract several times this year without any notice and without so much as an apology for doing so. I hear words like ‘strategy has definitely evolved’ and it really just sounds like PR speak for not living up to your commitments.
If you’ve decided you no longer can deliver 2 themes a month, that’s fine, but you need to enter into new contracts with all of your existing subscribers if that’s the case, as what we signed up for isn’t what you are delivering.
And, if you reply back to this with any variant of ‘we believe that we are no [sic] offering more value across the board to our subscribers,’ then you need to look again at what I just posted. It doesn’t matter what value you believe you are delivering. It matters what we signed up for vs. what we’re getting. In this case it is extremely easy to measure that. I signed up for 2 themes a month. I’m now getting 1 theme a month. You can throw all the ‘bonuses’ and ‘discounts’ around you want, but 1 theme != 2 themes.
@Atnevon You can moan all you like but you’ll get nowhere, the WP premium theme market is a law unto itself I’m afraid.
They’re all at it, i.e. changing their strategy. Changing strategy basically translates as “we’re trying to figure out how to make even more money”.
Gravity Forms are the masters at this. I was one of the earliest ‘members’ when it was lifetime updates, now they charge every 12 months.
AppThemes and Templatic are “transitioning”. Aiming no doubt for higher “perceived” value. Note, not “real” value, but “perceived” value.
We’re just a bunch of mugs lapping it up 😉
Totally agree with everything you’ve said re not getting what you signed up for, so don’t let what I’m about to say detract from that.
I personally prefer the increased functionality coming, as it’s more important to me to have my sites operating as efficiently as possible than to have new themes all the time. This is because I have about 5 of my own that I operate, rather than being a developer producing new sites for different clients, I assume?
Anyway I guess I’m not the only one so maybe that’s why the strategy has ‘evolved’.
At this point I guess some people don’t use woo at all because it doesn’t have functionality that they require, and so the wooteam want to remedy that asap then continue building themes.
Surely it should be a case of consulting with your paying customers (us) and then deciding on strategy not vice versa. I agree with all the comments here, you’ve been letting down your subscribers a lot this year, it’s a shame because I thought you were different to the rest.
Sickamanjaro!
So is this just an easier back end interface to Flexslider? Are there any other things it offers over Flexslider?
I think a video would have shown this off a lot better. Are there any plans to start producing more videos, I found them to be the far most useful resource on the website. There are quite a few products you offer now that would be greatly improved with related video content.
Hi Jon,
Yes, there are plans to produce more videos, as time allows. 🙂
WooSlider is a WordPress plugin for creating slideshows, which is powered by FlexSlider (create slideshows within your content, or anywhere in your theme’s template files).
With many WordPress users who like FlexSlider but don’t necessarily know how to integrate FlexSlider manually into WordPress, WooSlider caters for this by handling the integration.
WooSlider also comes bundled with a variety of slideshow types, as well as an easy-to-use API for creating slideshows out of just about any content available on your website. 🙂
You really need to create a bunch of examples to show us the possibilities.
I don’t understand why WooThemes is making this a premium ($35) option when many other theme companies include this functionality with all of their themes?
All of our themes will still include the default sliders (powered by the Flexslider V2 jQuery library) as we have done until now. This will never change and you don’t need WooSlider for that.
WooSlider are for users that need extended sliders within posts / pages, which aren’t supported out-of-box within any given theme. Similarly, WooSlider can also be used on any WordPress website; not just those that are using WooThemes.
Hi Paul,
WooSlider is a plugin which isn’t included in any specific theme. This allows you to use it on any theme you want, and you’ll get support with the purchase.
I’m sure you can’t use the functionality in the other themes outside of that theme right?
Have you any idea whether this slider also works with the Genesis framework? Thanks a ton!
Most definitely! 🙂
I think good price point, I wonder how it compares with Slidedeck2?
Also, good Thesis integration?
We haven’t compared WooSlider to Slidedeck, but are looking forward to your review. 🙂
And yep, WooSlider will work with Thesis as well. In fact, WooSlider will work with *any* WordPress installation running any theme (custom or purchased).
Will it even work on the notoriously awful AppThemes?
Of course!
Is there a developer license or something similar, the options panel looks great.
Thanks for the kind words! We really spent a lot of time figuring out the easiest & simplest way to handle options.
For the moment, this is the Developer license. This allows you to use WooSlider on as many WP installations as you wish. We are however working on functionality to enable tiered licensing going forward (to be implemented in a couple of months’ time). Until then we do so though, this is the Developer License and all purchases until then will be grandfathered on these terms.
Does that mean once I purchased it for 35$ I can ship the plugin together with my premium themes I sell? Can´t believe that.
Hi Michael,
To clarify:
WooSlider is licensed under the GPL, which means that you could resell or redistribute the code, providing the necessary attribution. The “WooSlider” name, however, will be registered as a trademark, so you’d need to rename the plugin if you’re bundling it with your themes.
Bundling the plugin with your themes would mean that your users won’t have access to our support resources for WooSlider, nor to updates as the plugin develops.
What we’d recommend in this regard is, instead of bundling WooSlider with your themes, we’d recommend catering for it in your themes with unique CSS styling and enhancements and encouraging your customers to purchase the plugin through an affiliate link that you’d setup with our referral program (thus earning you a commission for each new sign-up created when purchasing the plugin through us).
I hope this clarifies things, Michael. 🙂
I’ve been looking around for a better solution for displaying galleries of images – and perhaps this is it.
I’ve found that other Sliders aren’t compatible when blogs are using a CDN like Amazon S3 to host images. Is the WooSlider compatible with externally hosted images?
Hi Andrew,
Regarding serving images from CDNs, WooSlider should handle this with ease.
When serving images in, for example, the “Attached Images” slideshow type, WooSlider uses core WordPress functions to retrieve the images from the database. If you’ve got a plugin in place that filters this URL and replaces it with a CDN link to the image, that should slot in just fine in WooSlider. 🙂
In terms of niche slideshow types where very specific functionality is required, WooSlider provides a neat slideshows API for creating slideshow types to showcase just about any content you’ve got available on your website. 🙂
Hello,
The coupon code in the email I received is not working. The error message says, “Sorry, but this coupon is not valid for this package.”
I am a current club member… Do you have any idea what the issue might be?
I want to start using this asap! It looks awesome!
Thank you,
Christina
Christina,
Sorry about the issue there! I’ve fixed the coupon and you should get your discount 🙂
It worked! Thank you!
Hi Christina Please share a coupon also for me
Thank You
I would have liked to see a slider which you could also use on the header, THEN I would have bought it.
Hi Helen,
WooSlider can be used in the header or anywhere you want. You’ll need to use the template tag or shortcode in your template files directly in header.php and most likely apply a little CSS to make it look nice.
Can the width and height for the slide images all be set within the wooslider?
Ron
Hi Ron,
As WooSlider makes use of the FlexSlider2 jQuery slider (which is responsive), setting the width of the slideshow will automatically adjust the width of the images within the slideshow.
We use automatic height, for the most part, in WooSlider, as this helps with responsive scaling on devices with smaller screens. It is possible, however, to set a fixed height on the slideshow (if you aren’t too fussed about responsiveness at smaller screen sizes) and then set the smooth height setting to “false”. 🙂
Hi,
I was wondering, can this slider be used for different pages or posts. So for example, post 1 will have a different slide show than post 2 or 3 etc.
Thanks,
Dita
Hi Dita,
That’s absolutely correct. 🙂
You could have, for example, an “About” page which has a slideshow of your recent posts, and a “Services” page which has images (attached to the page) that showcase your various services.
You could even have two slideshows on the same page or post, showcasing different types of content. 🙂
Hi Matt,
That is really awesome. Thanks
So . . . just to dumb it down one notch further for the newbies like me: this is different than the slider that came with my theme?
Hi James,
That’s correct, yes. 🙂
The slider that comes bundled with your theme has been designed and integrated specifically into the theme and serves a specific purpose in terms of sliding specific types of content with a specific layout, functionality and design.
WooSlider is an extra optional layer on top of that, if you will. It allows for the creation of slideshows within your content or, using the template tags, within your theme’s template files.
To sum it up: if your existing WooThemes theme has a slider, WooSlider isn’t required for that slider to function. If you’d like to add more slideshows to your website with varying content, WooSlider is the plugin that handles this. 🙂
Woo Slider vs. Slidedeck 2 ???
I already have slidedeck 2…why should I buy woo slider? If someone has an thoughts…I would buy the woo slider today.
Thanks!
What’s the difference between FlexSlider and WooSlider? They look the same to me. Do the slideshows boost page views?
Hi Philip,
WooSlider is a WordPress plugin that creates slideshows of your content. WooSlider is powered by FlexSlider2, which is a jQuery plugin to create responsive slideshows.
So WooSlider (creates and manages the content of the slideshows) is powered by FlexSlider (creates the animated slideshow itself).
I hope this helps to clarify, Philip. 🙂
Thanks Matty. Makes sense. FlexSlider is the engine, but WooSlider is the administrative dashboard (and steering wheel).
One more question. I know that many media sites use sliders to boost page views as each slide is its own page (or something like that). Does this functionality work like that?
I believe you’re referring to hashbangs here, Philip?
WooSlider doesn’t make use of hashbangs, no. 🙂
Nice one, like that you haven’t changed default WordPress UI, as Slidedeck did. But I still like plugins of this guy a little more – http://dimsemenov.com/
$35?? lol I can buy an whole theme for that, and I dont see anything special about, so??
I was turned off about buying a memebership when I couldnt use paypal to purchase it…yet you push paypal in all your themes? Kinda hipocritical.
Where do we push PayPal in our themes?
Very nice slider! I agree its a bit pricy though, compared to sliders I’ve used from CCanyon.
I wasn’t aware woothemes does not take PP for membership? as this person states. The “pushing PP” comment, perhaps a reference to the fact that paypal is
a method of payment in all your themes checkout pages?
Anyhow great work, Im trying out a couple freebie themes before I purchase. thanks Ivo
Well one major issue with Slidedeck2 is that it is not responsive!
Is there an option for each photo in the slide show to live on its own page? And for each click of the “next” and “back” buttons to reload the page?
Hi Matt,
I assume you’re referring to hashbangs (where the slide ID is added with a # in the URL)?
At present, WooSlider doesn’t support hashbangs, no.
Does the WooSlider plugin also support thumbnail controlnav layouts like FlexSlider 2?
Hi Karl,
It certainly does, yes. 🙂
FlexSlider2’s thumbnail controls are built right in on slideshows that use images (you can enable it directly when adding any of the bundled slideshow types).
I just bought the plugin and installed it on a site that already had a lot of slideshows created and uses Canvas. I’m not seeing an option to display thumbnails for nav. How do I make that happen?
Comment threads aren’t perfect for support. 🙂 Please log a support ticket & we’ll help you out!
Two questions :
– When will be support forum again available
– ETA for new templates ?
Hi Naro,
Our support desk is available via http://support.woothemes.com/ (all WooSlider documentation is available there in our knowledgebase, by the way).
Regarding new themes, we’ve got some exciting new themes lined up for release in the (not too distant) future. 🙂
Thanks for answer want to see new themes 😉
I see FlexSlider but not WooSlider. Perhaps the WooSlider documentation is not yet implemented?
Thanks,
-Brett
Is there a demo in the works for WooSlider, beyond what is on the plugin’s page?
Hi John,
We’ll see what we can do about that. At present, the slideshow on the WooSlider page is, itself, running WooSlider. 🙂
Hi. I would like to install this on client sites. I have read your post above about using the affiliate route, but should I simply want to install it directly in a clients theme, using my licence, would they be able to see my licence details (email, serial number etc) or are these not visible in the wp-admin?
Thanks for your time. Andrew.
Will Wooslider display posts from custom post types?
Hi Andrew,
WooSlider can slide just about any content, yes.
If you’d like to create a specific integration with WooSlider for a custom post type, this can be done using our guide to the slideshows API, provided in our support desk’s knowledgebase.
If you’ve got any questions, please pop into our support desk as well, where our ninjas are on hand to assist. 🙂
Can you give me more guidance on how to display content from custom post types and custom taxonomies, please? I can only select categories from the standard Posts post-type.
That was fast and easy! I now have a WooSlider on my site with featured posts! AND custom CSS!!
I never could get FlexSlider to work right.
Thank you so so much for making this plugin!!!
Thanks for your very kind words, Christina. We’re so glad you’re enjoying WooSlider. 🙂
If you’ve got any questions that come up as you use the plugin, please pop into our support desk, where our ninjas are on hand to assist. 🙂
Demo ??? Please!
Hi Steven,
The slideshow on the WooSlider page itself ( http://woocommerce.com/wooslider/ ) is running WooSlider.
We’ll see what we can do about setting up a demo showcasing a few of the slideshow types available, in due course, as well. 🙂
Can I use WooSlider with a non-Woo theme?
Hi Teresa,
WooSlider works with any theme, yes, not just WooThemes themes. 🙂
Even those offered by AppThemes?
Hi Dr Octagon,
As I see it, WooSlider should function out of the box with pretty much any theme.
The majority of the time, the slideshow would be created using the “wooslider” shortcode. This should work in the content area of any of your pages or blog posts, provided the correct “the_content()” template tag is used when displaying the content of the page/post in question (this is a WordPress standard).
My advice would be to give it a test run and see how it goes. 🙂