Recently I wanted a plugin for my music blog which could display a slideshow of featured posts above all other posts. So I may keep displaying new content to the users along with some featured artists without taking much extra space. I googled for plugins to read reviews and see which one would work for me. I came across couple of plugins and techyard compiled a great list. I will highly recommend you to read techyard’s post and decide which one works best for you.
My Choice:
I chose Featurific and I will be writing about that here with reasons why I picked up that. I love automation, we all do. Making use of RSS feeds, updating my Facebook fan page automatically via RSS, updating my twitter automatically via RSS and stuff like that. That was the basic reason why I wanted to try Featurific, it is very automated. All I had to do was just select once which posts to display in the slideshow and I could do that with LOTS of variations. It allowed me to display posts through different categories, post IDs, recent posts, most commented or most popular. Since I wanted to display artists with my choice and not the ones which were more popular or commented so I chose to display posts through specific category hence keeping things more automated and quick. All I had to do was post all such artists in a category called “Featured” and chose featured category to be displayed in slideshow. It allowed me to change the number of posts to display. I could select the styles and templates of slideshow out of the library of almost 25 (and increasing).
How is it different from other such flash based slideshows:
I am sure you will be thinking displaying posts via category should be available in all other such plugins. Yes, true that is available. However, they don’t provide me the height of automation. For each post I’d like to display in the slideshow I will have to add a custom field for image which is an extra thing to do. This plugin will even work without any image in the post or it will make use of any image that is part of the post.
Support:
Another reason why I recommend this plugin over others is because of its support with non-wordpress sites. You can also implement it in other sites which are not wordpress based.
Features via (Techyard):
- Easy to install and highly customizable
- Runs in Flash 8
- 21 Templates to choose from.
- Customizable text, backgrounds, and images
- Works on any server, out of the box
- Runs in any browser
- Based on XML.
- Works on
WordPress blogs, and also with general sites. - Can also be placed in the sidebar.
Not something you were looking for? No problem! More such plugins enlisted at Techyard.