Trying out new plugins can be a lot of fun… or it can be a disappointing waste of time. How can you know which is which before you dive in? Ask around.
I’ve been playing with this plugin and talking with someoneelse who has used it and it is very easy to implement. And it works. It does not have every option in the world, which is a good thing, but it has the essentials, like captions, links, timer, and randomization. I wish I had this last month when I reworked an image rotator for a friend. Getting the job done quickly was the first order of business, and this certainly would have been no harder than what I used, and that one didn’t have captions.
There are some quirky things about this plugin that may be good or bad for your usage. First, the images are defined inside of your jQuery block. That’s good if you like the idea of not showing the images to people who have Javascript turned off. It is also dead easy to add images, since you just have to name them 1, 2, 3, 4, etc and tell jQuery how many there are. However, if you want to show the images, or at least one image, even when Javascript fails, then this won’t work for you without some tweaks. Another quirk is that the captions are defined in your jQuery. That’s kinda good, since they will fail for non-JS viewers just like the images. And you can define each image as a link (again, inside your jQuery block), which is just a really handy feature.
At first I was a bit negative about the fact that the images aren’t in the HTML in an unordered list the way I am used to seeing them. But then I recalled the little kludge I had to add to the last slider I used. Because the images flash onto the screen for a few milliseconds before the jQuery kicks in, I had to hid the div with CSS and then unhide it with jQuery. With all of the definitions inside of the jQuery, nothing shows up until the jQuery loads. Yes, I could move my jQuery to the HTML head block, but there are reasons I put it at the bottom of the body. With Easy Slider 1.1 I don’t have to compromise. I like that. Oh, and the images probably won’t get indexed by robots. Fine by me, but YMMV.
The site says that this is, “Possibly the easiest to use jQuery plugin for making slideshows!” I can’t really find fault with that. Well, maybe I’d leave off the exclamation point, but that’s just me.
