A “slider” is a quick way to change the look of a page and put up new content in a hurry. This would be especially useful on the home page. Content, such as an ad for an event or a headline announcement could be developed off-line as an image and then uploaded for the slider.
The following discussion is for creating and editing sliders. To insert a slider on a page, click “Add Widget” and look for Smart Slider in the All Widgets list. You will be given a list of the sliders you can insert.
The “Smart Slider” plugin is opened from the menu list on the left of the dashboard. You will see an item for each slider in use. To open one for editing roll over with mouse and click edit button. The three dots in the upper righthand corner provide other options like delete or duplicate.
There are three slider sets in the initial launch. You can add, remove, and disable slides. You can create new sliders. New slide images should be close to the size and proportions of the slider, but they don’t have to be exact. If the image is too small, the slide will be filled with the background color. If too large, it will be resized by the application. Images should be uploaded to the media library before they are selected for a slider.
The initial sliders are:
“Slider ACLT”, 690 x 280 pixels, shown on home page.
“Bird Slider, 275 x 200 pixels, shown on birds page.
“Double Oak Farm Scenes”, 380 x 380 pixels, shown on Double Oak Farm page.
Editing a Slider.
–If you want to disable (“unpublish”) a slide click the green check mark and it will turn into a red circle with an x. To enable a slide, click the x.
–To change the order, drag the slides
Add a Slide (Example for the home page.)
–Create an image. Make it close to the size of the slider (690 x 280 px for the home page). –click “New Slide”
–Media Library will open; select slide or upload and select your slide and it will show up in the list for the slider, click edit.
Click “Settings”.
–Make the “name” the text you want to display on the slider. The default is the name of the image file. If you are going to display a caption on the image, change the name to a brief caption. If you don’t want a caption on the image, clear the “Name” field.
–If you want people to click on the slide to go to another page, enter the URL in “link”.
Click “Background”.
You will see several choices for fitting the image into the slider. I usually check “fit”. This means the slider will keep the image’s aspect ratio when it resizes the image to fit and if it is too small in one dimension it will be padded with the background fill color. The default color is transparent. On the bird slider I used gray for a fill color.
–If you use “fill” rather than fit, the slider program will make it fit. If the image is close to the right size, the distortion won’t be noticeable.
–Save each choice as you make it and the slider will be ready to go.
The slider program has many options for text placement and other features. It takes some experimentation and I was happy enough with the simple approach.
Be sure to Save all changes.