Adding a slider to your WordPress site should be easy, right? If you’re depending on using a plugin from the WordPress repository, sometimes it can turn into a downright nightmare. Hacking the plugin to look and work like you want it to can be quite a chore – that is assuming that you have the skills to do it.
Introducing Soliloquy: A slider plugin that just works!
Soliloquy is a game-changing slider plugin for WordPress, created by Thomas Griffin. It’s completely responsive using the FlexSlider jQuery script. The code foundation has been hardened with security and fully audited by WordPress core developer Mark Jaquith.
What makes Soliloquy really stand out from the crowd? Speed, Scalability and Interface. The plugin is packed full of features and options, everything you could ever want from a slider:
- Speed: Soliloquy only loads the files it needs – when it needs them.
- SEO-Friendly: Each image and link can have its own title, and images can have their own alt tags.
- Scalability: Soliloquy can handle as many sliders as you want on a single page.
- Interface: Smooth drag-and-drop interface enhanced by Ajax to sort and organize your images.
- Responsiveness: Each Soliloquy slider responds and adjusts to any environment on the fly.
- User AND developer-friendly: Tons of hooks and filters so that you can extend its functionality, and includes both PHP and Ajax APIs for creating addons
- Compatible with WordPress MultiSite: Works perfectly when network-activated
Check out the convenient drag-and-drop media uploader for slides:
Slider management includes options to easily change the default size, transition, speed, animation, automation, navigation, and much more.
If you need lightbox support, Soliloquy also has a full-featured Lightbox Add-on:
That sounds good, but is it really the best?
After testing Soliloquy, I conclude that this is by far the easiest to use and one of the most tastefully designed sliders available for WordPress users. The sleek interface and full usage of WordPress’ capabilities blows every other slider plugin out of the water.
I was able to create and add a quick slider with six slides in two minutes flat.
Soliloquy is priced at just $20 per year for a single support license and $100/yr for developer support, which includes priority ticketing.
If you’re struggling with sliders from the WordPress repository and you can never quite get them working like you want, stop wasting your time and get Soliloquy today. It’s such a delight to use that you’ll likely opt to use it every time you need a slider in WordPress.
Seems like this WPMU coverage would have been the perfect opportunity to encourage sales with a special discount.
It does seem to have potential but $100 per year is kind of pricey when you consider that the thumbnails add-on is not yet available.
Gravity Forms became the most successful commercial WordPress plugin by giving early adopters a lifetime developer membership for the price of an annual developer membership. That got a lot of people to jump onboard and start evangelizing about it.
So for $20 you can only use it on 1 site or can you use it on multiple sites but only get support and updates for one site?
Think I answered my own question by reading their terms:
“Single licenses” grant you one year of access to support forums and documentation.
So you can install it on as many domains as you want for $20 which aint bad at all.
“1 Year Of Updates and Support for One Site”
So, you do have complete access to the forum but, strictly speaking, you couldn’t ask for help trouble-shooting several different sites. For most problems, however, you wouldn’t have to mention what site you happened to be working on but, no, the license does not entitle you to that.
Also, it looks as though you would only get you that convenience of automated updates for one site, a screenshot of the upgrade process showed that it uses unique AWS identifiers, so, you’d probably have to copy each new version to your other sites manually after you’d downloaded it to your single authorized site.
Apologies for the typos above, this comment system has no edit feature :(
Neil,
You are correct. Since the plugin is licensed under the GPL license, I cannot limit Soliloquy (or any other GPL plugin for that matter) to a certain number of instances. In that light, you could purchase the $20 license and install it on as many as sites as you want and it would be well within the terms. However, the license key would only provide access to updates and support for the site where the license is currently active.
And yes, the downloads are delivered through Amazon S3 without unique signing, encoding and expiration parameters, so that download link is only good for the upgrade.
Hi Thomas,
I think you are onto a winner here as the whole responsive thing has totally exploded.
But you say I can only update one install. Yet once people have done the update they will have the updated version which they can roll out to other sites?…..Im guessing illegally? How can you stop this?
Im sure you know your biz model but maybe because you have set up the whole API/plugabble thing then perhaps people would pay a higher membership to have access to these extra features. So the basic slider at $20 and become a member for $50 a year to gain access to support and extra features…..just a thought ;)
Don’t expect an answer to your concerns about pricing, Thomas has made it clear that he does not tolerate that sort of feedback.
It doesn’t matter, Sarah has just reported on a better responsive slider from DevPress:
http://wpmu.org/daily-tip-devpress-releases-free-responsive-slider-plugin-for-wordpress/
DevPress have a good track record, they appreciate feedback, they respond to questions and their plugin is free – hopefully most readers held back and decided not to pay $100 to Thomas until he actually delivered on his promised features, for most DevPress plugin will now be a better option.
Unfortunately the Devpress version really isnt as good though. You can only have one slider, that may suit some but its not a plugin for bigger sites where multi-sliders are required.
In regards to the pricing question, I can’t stop this – people will be deceitful and do unlawful things. However, by consenting to agree to the Terms of Service when purchasing the plugin, should they do this and get caught, I’d have legal rights. And users can upgrade to a Developer license and receive those benefits mentioned. :-)
I would respectfully disagree that the DevPress slider is better. One instance is that the DevPress version (or basically any other slider plugin for that matter) outputs the CSS/JS for the slider on every single page, regardless of whether or not it has actually has a slider. Soliloquy does not a do this, either in the main plugin itself or in the addons. It only loads CSS/JS whenever a slider is present, and if multiple sliders are present on the same page, it only loads the necessary files once.
I appreciate your comments on the plugin!
Does the Soliloquy Settings UI make it possible to set up a slider based on a certain post categori (or custom post field value), where it would then show either the posts featured images or an image specified using a custom field? If not, how would this then be acheived using the Soliloquy API?
Thanks for mentioning DevPress and our plugin. I feel I need to clarify a few things :).
The DevPres plugin is quite simple, it was built to solve a specific internal (for DevPress) problem. Its development took no more than 3-4 days, considering the fact that I am primarily a theme developer. It’s an early release and has quite a few notable limitations – the lack of option for multiple sliders being the most notable.
So it’s not a fully featured solution like Soliloquy. Judging by the plugin description, Soliloquy should be your primary choice if you are looking for a commercially supported slider plugin.
Having said that, we haven’t even started expanding our plugin, and we may decide to eventually turn it into a decent competitor on this market :) .
Can I write text on pictures with this slider? Like captions with linkes and so on..