Michael, to change the time delay just click on ‘Promotions’ in the admin area and select the ‘Slider Options’ page. You can change the time delay here. I have also included support for custom links from the promo slider. Just go to the editing screen for a promotion and fill our the destination URL meta box that appears below the content editing area.

You can use the following code in your theme file: <?php do_shortcode('[promoslider]'); ?>

There are more detailed instructions and options available in the readme.txt file and on the WordPress plugin page.

Michael,

The promo slider can be setup to do this. You can run three instances of the promo slider side by side and disable the nav. It will require some css changes, but shouldn’t be too complicated.

David,

Unfortunately, WordPress.org isn’t showing the latest release of my plugin properly. Version 2.0.0 is the latest version and includes better support for image uploads and allows display based on categories. Currently, you have to visit the permalinks page in the admin area once the plugin is installed, but I will be eliminating the need for this with the next version. You can click on the download link on my site or select the ‘Other Versions’ link from the WordPress.org plugin page (on the sidebar to the right) and select the latest version.

Without an image, only the gray background will appear. The content and title will not appear in the slider unless you change the css, as per the readme.txt file. Get the latest version, read the readme.txt file that comes with the plugin, and let me know if you have any more issues.

Thanks for the recommendations! I have just released the latest version today.

I have changed the slider nav so that it provides a visual indicator to the user as to which slide they are on. The colors can easily be changed using css. I have also changed the javascript so that the time delay gets reset when the user clicks a link in the navigation.

I have implemented a solution for ordering the promotions, but it does involve adding some lines to your functions.php file. You can see the updated instructions for more details.

To have more than one slider with multiple sizes, just create two sliders using the shortcode:

[promoslider id="promoslider_sidebar"]
[promoslider id="promoslider_content"]

and use css to change the dimensions for each, like this:

#promoslider_sidebar { height:150px; width:150px; }
#promoslider_content { height:480px; width:640px; }

all other sliders will default to a height of 235px and the width will adapt based on where it is placed.

I am not so sure that most people have caught on, but this plugin makes it possible to show ads of various sizes in multiple locations on a page. For example, you could create a header banner ad location and create a category called ‘Header Banner’. By using the shortcode to assign a custom id and category, you could change the dimensions of that slider to match a traditional banner ad and show only ads that you assign to the ‘Header Banner’ category.

For starters, you will have to upload images that are of exact dimensions. The height of the slider defaults to 235px, so unless you have changed it, you will want your image to be the same height. The slider width varies to match your theme, unless you have given it an exact width. The demo slider you saw has an image width of about 400px. Assuming that width will work for you, just upload an image that is 400px wide and 235px high.

Next, you will want to enable the display of the slider title and add some custom text to the slider. All you have to do is drop this code into your theme’s functions.php file:

add_action('promoslider_content', 'promoslider_display_title', 10, 5);
add_action('promoslider_content', 'promoslider_extra_content', 10, 5);
function promoslider_extra_content(){
echo '<div class="promo_slider_extra_content"><< Click image for details...</div>';
}

Finally, you will want to customize the way that the title and custom text appear in the slider. You can drop these lines into your theme’s style.css file:

div.promo_slider_title{background:none; position:absolute; top:15px; right:30px; width:auto; height:auto; padding:0; padding-left:400px; text-align:right; font-size:20px; line-height:20px;}
div.promo_slider_title a{color:#fff;}
div.promo_slider_extra_content{position:absolute; top:100px; right:30px; color:#fff; font-size:12px;}

If you decide to change the width of your images, just change the 400 in padding-left:400px; to the number of pixels wide you want the images to be.

Just to be clear, the slider only uses featured images on the slider. If you put an image in the content area, it will not show in the slider.

If you have successfully added a featured image, everything should work just fine. I am guessing that you may have an issue with WordPress not knowing the proper location of the image. If the link in the promotion editing page says ‘Remove featured image’ and you don’t see the image directly above this text, this is most likely the issue. If the image shows in the featured image box, but not in the slider, it is probably something going awry with the plugin.

If the issue seems to be with the plugin, the best thing to do is put the promotion slider on a private page where I can visit it and see what is going on.

Hmm… thanks for letting me know! It was running multiple sliders before. I didn’t recall making any changes to the jQuery, so I will have to look into it!

The plugin should be adding the ‘Featured Image’ button for you if you are using the latest version. Otherwise, it sounds like the theme you are using may be limiting this feature just to your posts. Perhaps try switching to the default WordPress theme to see if the ‘Featured Image’ option is available on the Promotion editing page then?

This has been fixed with the most recent version. All you have to do is download version 3.0.0!

Thanks for letting me know! I will be fixing this little bug in the next update. For now, just omit the $id argument from your function, like this:

function change_promotion_order($query){
$query['orderby'] = 'title';
$query['order'] = 'ASC';
return $query;
}
add_filter('promoslider_query', 'change_promotion_order');

You may not be seeing a change in the order simply because the ascending order by title is the same as the ascending order by post date. To test this, just change the ASC to DESC to reverse the order. If you don’t see a change, let me know exactly what code you are using.

Sorry about that. I changed the way the shortcode returns the slider to fix another issue. All you need to do is add the word ‘echo’ in front of the do_shortcode() function like this:
echo do_shortcode('[promoslider]');

Hmm… if you can send me a link to the broken slider, I would like to take a look.

I have included automatic support for post thumbnails in the plugin, but some themes seem to have issues with it anyways. You can just drop this line into your theme’s functions.php and it should work:

add_theme_support('post-thumbnails');

These are some great ideas! I have added them to my list of improvements for future updates.

I really appreciate the feedback!

Thanks for letting me know. I will update accordingly.

Are you getting a ‘Featured Image’ box on the right-hand side when you are on the ‘Add New’ promotion screen? Look at the bottom right of this image for an example of what you should see.

Keep in mind that only images that are uploaded using the featured image box will appear in the slider.

You may want to upgrade to the latest version, which is now 3.2.0, and see how that works for you.

Linda,
All of your promotions still exist in the database, old and new. What happened it that some update code failed to run when you upgraded the Promotion Slider. Because of this, your old promotions are just not accessible or used by WordPress. If you have re-entered all the promotions, upgrading will not cause you to loose anything. I promise.

None of my code has, or will, delete information in your database. If anything, you may notice that a future upgrade may cause your old promotions to re-appear… at that time you can feel free to delete them yourself.

For anyone whose promotions have ‘disappeared’, feel free to drop this code in your functions.php file to manually run the upgrade code:

function change_legacy_post_type(){ global $wpdb; $wpdb->query("UPDATE ".$wpdb->posts." SET post_type = '"ps_promotion"' WHERE post_type = 'promotion'"); } add_action('init', 'change_legacy_post_type');

Once your promotions ‘reappear’, you can remove this code from your functions.php file. You need only to visit your website after adding the code.

You can use the ad code box at the bottom of the promotion editing page to enter HTML or third party ad code. Ideally, if you just want an image that links to a specific page, you only need to upload a featured image and customize the link options to your liking. If you do use the ad code box, you will have to check the checkbox just above it to activate the display of the code.

Al,
The 3.2+ updates are supposed to run some code on activation that update your old promotions to the new post type. I had named the custom post type for the Promotion Slider ‘promotion’, which is a bad practice. I properly namespaced them in the 3.2+ versions, but had to run some code to change the old post type to the new one. The old promotions are actually still in your database, but the code that was supposed to convert them to the new post type must have failed to run.

As far as the redirect, it would seem that the proper rewrite rules for the post type may not have been added either. Perhaps you could try deleting the promotion slider completely and installing the latest version? I will be looking into these issues more, but it may take some time… I am swamped with projects. You can always revert back to an older version, like 3.1.0, if you need to.

The first thing to do is to check your theme to see if the wp_footer() hook is in the footer. The javascript file is included via this hook and without it, only one static image will display.

Looks like you got it working!

If you want to insert the shortcode into the header container, you will have to edit your theme’s header.php file. You will need to add this into that div:

<php? echo do_shortcode('[promoslider]'); ?>

Not sure why, but the upgrade code that handles the promotions has messed up for certain users. On all the sites I have upgraded, it has worked fine. Let me know if you ran across any errors during the upgrade.

You can actually use the latest version and plop some code in your functions.php file to make your promotions re-appear:

function change_legacy_post_type(){ global $wpdb; $wpdb->query("UPDATE ".$wpdb->posts." SET post_type = 'ps_promotion' WHERE post_type = 'promotion'"); } add_action('init', 'change_legacy_post_type');

Just add the code, visit a page on your site, check your promotions to be sure they are there, and then you can remove the code from your functions.php file. Version 3.2.0 was when I updated the post_type for promotions. If you want to revert back, you will have to go back to 3.1.0.

This is why I created the ‘promoslider_content’ action hook. You can remove the excerpt from the slider with remove_action() and then add your own excerpt (or content) by adding your own action. No changing the plugin, no worries about overwriting your changes when upgrading!

Ana,

It sounds like you might not have the wp_footer() hook in your theme’s footer.php file. If that is not there, you will only see the first featured image in the slider and there will be no navigation available. If this isn’t the issue, a link to the actual slider itself would be helpful.

Sorry, I am not entirely clear on what you are asking here. If you added a slider on the category pages, you would still have to specify which category to pull from in the shortcode. Typically the category page would just list out the promotions (title, excerpt) that are in a given category.

The grey background image is assigned to the panels. You can remove the background by adding this line to your theme’s css file:

.promo_slider div.panel {background:none;}

To make the background white, you can add this line to your css file:

.promo_slider {background:white;}

Currently, you would have to alter the plugin to include your own transition effects. I intend to add some more transition effects in the next major release. This is the most important improvement I can make at this point. So, if you can wait… I definitely will be working on this.

What exactly do you mean by stopped working? Did you update any themes or plugins at the same time?

Currently, the plugin only allows starting the slider on a random slide or the first slide. What you want is doable, but would require custom alterations.

You can use the built-in hooks to customize the query for the slider. You may want to check out the ‘promoslider_query’ and ‘promoslider_query_by_id’ hooks. You can read more about these in the documentation.

Thanks for pointing this out. I will be releasing more detailed instructions (complete with sample screenshots) soon.

There is. Unfortunately I haven’t really built in an option for that into the settings. You would have to make the change the jQuery file in the plugin. I am using the default .fadeIn() and .fadeOut() options. You would simply need to specify a time setting as a parameter.

There is an options panel in the WordPress admin. When you click on ‘Promotions’, the settings page is in the sub-menu.

Sorry, the plugin uses features only available in WordPress 3.0+

Well, post_type_exists() is a valid WordPress function. I would start by making sure you have a complete install of WordPress and that no files are missing or corrupted.

Every time this has happened to me, z-index has fixed the problem. Without taking a look at the site, I couldn’t really offer much help.

Thanks for sharing! I can see a few things that would need updating, but it always great to have a starting point!

Yes. Definitely requires PHP5. A few other people have gotten the same error… all of which were related to their version of PHP.

Chances are that your theme doesn’t have wp_footer() in the footer.php file. Without this, the javascript that makes the slider progress isn’t being loaded.

The default action is to use slides from the promotions post type if you specify a category. Example: [promoslider category="cat-1"]

If you want to show categories from your regular posts, you will also have to specify the post type. Example: [promoslider post_type="post" category="cat-1"]

While the slider does support pulling other post types as well, it does not support pulling of categories from post types other than posts or promotions. If a category does not exist (e.g. you type it incorrectly in the shortcode), the slider will simply ignore your category request and pull all the published posts. If a post type does not exist, the slider will ignore your post type request and show the promotions by default.

Chances are, you may be correctly calling the non-promotion category, but have forgotten to upload featured images for the posts in that category.

If a category doesn’t exist, the default action is to display all the promotions instead. Given the results that you are getting, I would say that you have either misspelled the category name (or slug) or the category really doesn’t exist. Do be careful that you are looking at the correct list of categories as well. Posts have categories and promotions have categories, which some people have occasionally confused.

Currently, you will have to upload images that fit the size of the slider that you are using. The next release, which should be out in the next week, will allow you to filter the image sizes.

The plugin should work with 3.1 as it stands. Are you sure you may not have done something to affect the slider? Perhaps if you have a link to the slider I could take a look.

Strange thing about the post duplicating… I haven’t heard of anyone with that problem before. I would have to take a closer look at that one…

You can easily add the banner in the footer.php file of your theme to display it on all the pages. Wherever you want the slider to appear in your theme, you just drop in this code (wrapped in php tags where appropriate):

echo do_shortcode('[promoslider]');

On a sidenote, because of the way the elements are laid out on your site, the promo_slider_wrapper div is invisibly covering everything on your homepage and causing all the elements to be unclickable. This is due to the promo_slider_wrapper’s relative positioning and all the floats you have assigned to the elements on the page. You will probably want to make some adjustments to your CSS.

Just use categories to group your promotions. You can create a ‘books’ category and a ‘videos’ category, then use the following shortcodes on each respective page:

[promoslider category="books"]
[promoslider category="videos"]

Right now, there is only one transition. I am working on adding a bunch of other transitions soon.

Yes. You would just change your CSS to hide the excerpt div and then show it when someone hovers over the slider.

Absolutely! I designed this plugin specifically to allow multiple sliders on the same page.

Currently, the arrows only control the slider images. The thumbnails do not slide… yet.

Rich, it appears that your theme is set to display all post types. Disabling this should fix the problem.

Gina, it is possible to display blog posts and promotions or any other custom combination of content. However, it will require a little bit of programming knowledge to write the code to do it. The ‘promoslider_custom_query_results’ hook would be the way you would customize this.

By default, the fancy title display is a link. You can, however, easily add and edit the content that appears on the slides using the handy filters that I created. The ‘promoslider_content’ filter will allow you to insert your logo and link on every slide, which you can then style using css. Just click on ‘Read our Documentation’ from the promotion slider options page for more information.

Phil, I think your code was removed automatically. Perhaps you could provide a link to where the slider isn’t working? Typically, I have found that if the images aren’t appearing and you are seeing a grey box, the issue is that the featured images aren’t set at all. Perhaps this data was lost in the transfer?

I will have to add the ability to use the other target attributes on the links. Thanks for the feedback!

I am not sure I understand your question. Would you elaborate?

Yes. The promoslider_content filter allows you to remove and add elements in any order you want.

Have you tried saving your permalinks on the ‘Permalinks’ page under ‘Settings’ in the WordPress admin menu? Sometimes doing this once or twice will fix the problem.

Kevin, it would appear that you have inserted the image into the promotion page, but haven’t actually set the featured image. Here is a step-by-step:

• First, click on the ‘Set Featured Image’ link in the Featured Image box.
• You can either upload an image from your computer or use an image from your media library.
• After uploading or selecting an image, click on the ‘Use as featured image’ link (not ‘Insert into Post’).
• Once you have set the featured image, you should see the image appear within the Featured Image box.

Line 127 of style.css in your Sliding Door theme is adding top margin to all the images inside of posts. You will have to add a more specific rule to override this for the Promotion Slider. Add this line to the bottom of your style.css file:
#content .post .promo_slider img { margin:0; }

There is a setting in the options panel. Look for ‘Start on:’ and change from ‘First Slide’ (default) to ‘Random Slide’. You can also use the shortcode to define this, like so: [promoslider start_on="random"]

JC,

There is a hook called ‘promoslider_content ‘ that is detailed on the FAQ page. You would use this to create your own custom markup within the slider panels.

The promotion slider doesn’t do anything with the excerpt except print it out. WordPress uses the ‘excerpt_more’ filter to allow you to change the link that follows the excerpt, so I would try using this filter for the ‘ps_promotion’ post type.

E-man,

Could you point me to the slider where this is happening? I would like to see what is going on and possibly do some troubleshooting.

It actually does loop through all six pictures, but the last thumbnail image is not shown because there isn’t enough width. If you click on the right arrow, it will loop through everything. I realize that this is an issue and am working on an overhaul of the thumbnail nav that will work with the new jQuery version in WordPress 3.2+

Dawn,
There is a way to change the directory, but it will require changing the code in the plugin itself. The downside to such a change is that future upgrades to the plugin will overwrite your custom changes. However, this is a pretty simple change and could easily be made after upgrading later on. First, you will need to open up the index.php file found in the plugin directory. Next, find lines 76 and 84 in the code (in version 3.3.1). Both of these lines will read ‘slug’ => ‘promotion’, but one of these will be plural and the other singular. Change the words to whatever you want, just make sure you don’t change both slugs to match, since one is for individual promotions and the other is for promotion categories. Finally, just make sure to re-save your permalink settings in WordPress and you should see all your promotions displayed under the new URLs.