New Slider Template – Monolith Full Slider

Prepare for a visual spectacle like no other with the Monolith Full Slider. It’s not just a slider; it’s a dynamic canvas for showcasing your content with bold flair. With its sleek design and smooth transitions, this slider template isn’t just about conveying your brand identity; it’s about immersing your audience in an unforgettable visual journey right from the very first slide. Ignite curiosity, captivate, and leave a mark.

Live Preview

New Slider Template – Monolith Boxed Slider

Elevate your website’s charm and captivate visitors with the Monolith Boxed Slider template. This isn’t just a slider; it’s a gateway to a dazzling experience. Its contemporary design and dynamic content will leave your audience spellbound, ensuring your message resonates long after they’ve left your site.

Live Preview

New Slider Template – Office Exercises

Prepare to be wowed by the exceptional Office Exercises slider template. It’s not just a collection of images; it’s a symphony of stunning visuals and seamless animations that beckon busy professionals to prioritize their well-being. This slider isn’t just about conveying information; it’s about sparking inspiration. With every slide, you’ll captivate your visitors, promote healthier lifestyles, and ensure your content shines brightly.

Live Preview

Conclusion

All things considered, the Template Sliders feature serves as your shortcut to crafting stunning sliders, blocks, or pages in a flash. And guess what? Smart Slider is growing, which means we keep adding more and more ready-made templates just for you.

In addition, with Monolith by your side, you can turn your creative visions into reality in no time at all. Welcome to a world of endless possibilities with Smart Slider’s Slide Library and the Monolith theme!

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But Smart Slider offers more than just ready made sliders. In fact, it has a Slide Library, which offers slide templates. You can use these to create custom sliders, or to add a new slide to your existing slider.

What is the Slide Library?

The Slide Library is actually very similar to the Template Library. The main difference is that you don’t import ready sliders, but you load one slide template at a time. This allows you to build each slide of your slider one by one. You can choose the next slide from the various categories.

The Slide Library contains 8 categories, and each of them contains 10 slides. That’s a ton of slides to choose from! The available categories are: header, media, feature, content, testimonial, team, product and number. For example, the header category contains slides that’ll help you create nice headers. Would you rather display your clients’ testimonials? Have a look at the Testimonial category to pick fitting designs.

Where to find the Slide Library?

You can access the Slide Library at your slides. First, go to the Slide Editor by clicking on the slide thumbnail. Then, open the Add panel and go to the Library tab. Here you can select the theme you want to pick slides from and open the categories to browse the slides. To load a library slide to your currently edited slide, click on its thumbnail. Please note: any content you had on the slide before it is overwritten.

Some slides are available in the Free version of Smart Slider. We have marked the Pro only slides with a Pro badge. To be able to download these slides, you need to to activate your Smart Slider pro plan on your domain.

Introducing the new Slide library theme, Nala

When we launched the Slide Library in 3.2 it contained one theme, Orion. Our goal with the Slide Library was to offer slides with matching designs. Orion had more than 100 slides like this, so it was a great start for the Slide Library. Today I’m happy to introduce our new Slide library theme, Nala.

Explore Theme

Nala is a new theme that brings the Slide Library to the next level. It features slides that look super modern, unique and colorful. Additionally, it’s easy to match these slides and create unique designs. Nala adds 10 slides to each library category. Additionally, it offers a dark and light theme for every slide.

New slider templates

To show you the power and possibilities of the Slide Library, we created not one but four new templates. They are based on individual Slide Library templates. So, they’re great to display how gorgeous the Nala theme is.

New slider template – Nala Page Dark

The Nala Page Dark template is a gorgeous dark landing page. It uses an orangish color for highlight which looks spectacular. Layer animations and Shape Dividers make it more interesting for visitors.

New slider template – Nala Page Light

The Nala Page Light template is a clean and modern landing page. It features gorgeous images, cool layer animations and Shape Dividers. Additionally, it’s highlight color is blue which makes it perfect for any business.

New slider template – Nala Fullpage

The Nala Fullpage template is the perfect hero for your site. It’s a full page slider so it’ll have plenty of space to captivate your visitors.

New slider template – Nala Showcase

The Nala Showcase template the perfect choice for you if you’re looking for an interesting way to tell your story. It looks amazing and offers plenty of slides to display amazing content.

Conclusion

The Template Sliders are one of Smart Slider’s most powerful features. They let you create gorgeous sliders, blocks or pages quickly. As Smart Slider keeps growing, we can offer more and more ready-made templates for our users. The new Slide Library theme is a great addition to Smart Slider and it will help you build stunning modern slides in no time.

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https://smartslider3.com/blog/wordpress-6-0-is-coming/ Thu, 12 May 2022 07:07:48 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=46930 WordPress 6.0, the second major WordPress release of 2022 is scheduled for release soon. What to expect from the next WordPress version? What are the most exciting changes? Let’s explore them together! WordPress 6.0 release stages Every major WordPress release goes through certain release stages. This allows volunteers to thoroughly test the new version before […]

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]]> WordPress 6.0, the second major WordPress release of 2022 is scheduled for release soon. What to expect from the next WordPress version? What are the most exciting changes? Let’s explore them together!

WordPress 6.0 release stages

Every major WordPress release goes through certain release stages. This allows volunteers to thoroughly test the new version before public release. Currently WordPress 6.0 is scheduled for release on May 24, 2022. Below there are the stages of the 6.0 release:

12 April 2022	Beta 1
19 April 2022	Beta 2
26 April 2022	Beta 3
2 May 2022	Beta 4
3 May 2022	Release candidate 1
10 May 2022	Release candidate 2
17 May 2022	Release candidate 3
23 May 2022	Dry run
24 May 2022	WordPress 6.0 is released

Most important changes in WordPress 6.0

The new major WordPress release introduces significant changes and improvements. Some of the changes help moving towards WordPress being a complete site editor. One of the most important steps for this is to update the Gutenberg editor in WordPress core.

Gutenberg update

Major WordPress releases include the latest version of the Gutenberg plugin. Gutenberg was introduced in WordPress 5.0. back in December, 2018. Since then, it has become the new way to edit pages and posts in WordPress. Additionally, it has managed to divide the WordPress community as soon as it arrived. There are many users who love the new editor and are eagerly waiting to see how much it can evolve. However, there are many other users who hated Gutenberg from the minute they could start to use it.

WordPress 6.0 will integrate Gutenberg 13.0. This new version includes many improvements to help Gutenberg evolve into a site builder. Of course, there’s a long road ahead before Gutenberg can turn into a website builder. Let’s check some of the most exciting improvements Gutenberg 13.0 will bring to WordPress users!

Selecting text across blocks

The Gutenberg editor uses blocks to build content. A paragraph is a block of text, so are headings, images and other content. Previously when you tried to select texts, you could only do so within the current block you were editing. However, from now on you can select text between several blocks. It can be useful for formatting the text.

Additionally, it helps to make the editing workflow smoother. You can quickly get rid of the text you no longer need that’s divided into more blocks.

New blocks and block enhancements

Blocks help you build content, so it’s always nice to have a new selection of blocks. Gutenberg 13 includes a couple of new blocks. Some of the most interesting new blocks are:

• Stack: Lets you stack your content vertically.
• Avatar: Helps to display the avatar of a specific user or the author of the post.
• Read more: Creates a Read more button that links to the post. Useful in category pages.
• Post Author biography: Displays the biography of the post author.
• Comments query loop: This block is actually replacing the Post comments block. Gives advanced customization features to style the comment list.

Block enhancements

There are many block enhancements coming with WordPress 6.0. Here are the most notable ones:

• Featured image at media and text and cover blocks. Previously the featured image was only available at the post featured image block. From now on it’ll be possible to add the featured image to the media and text and also to the cover block.
• Lock reusable blocks. Helps to prevent (accidental) changes in a single instance of a reusable block.
• Typography options for container blocks. Group, row, and stack blocks have typography options from now on.
• Keeping block style. If you change your block type (e.g. from paragraph to heading) the block styling will stay. This includes color and typography.
• Gallery spacing. The Gallery block now offers the possibility to set the spacing between the images.

New Full site editing changes

Full site editing was first introduced in WordPress 5.9. It’s a collective term for WordPress’ new features. These new features include template and site editing. You can think of it as the first step to make WordPress a complete website builder tool. Users can edit their sites using blocks in many ways that before were only possible by writing code. However, they’ll need a block enabled theme that supports full site editing.

Keep in mind that in WordPress 6.0. Release Candidate 1 the Full Site Editing feature is still in Beta.

Theme styles

The first new feature of the Full Site Editing is the ability to switch theme styles. Each theme can have many separate theme styles which you can change by one click. For example, there might be a style which has white background and dark text colors. But the theme devs can define another style which has a blue background and light text colors. Font families, text sizes can also differ among styles.

New page templates

Due to the Gutenberg 13 integration, WordPres 6.0 will have five new page templates. The new templates are the following: author, date, categories, tag, and taxonomy.

Export block themes

WordPress 6.0 will allow you to export the created block-based theme to re-use it on other sites. It’s also a good way to have a backup of your customized theme, just in case.

Under the Hood changes

Apart from the visible changes, WordPress 6.0 comes with a bunch of under the hood improvements.

• Webfonts API. Provides an efficient way for theme authors to manage local fonts with PHP or theme.json.
• API to prevent certain blocks from appearing in Widget Areas. Not all Blocks were made to be used as widgets. WordPress 6.0 offers developers an API to prevent blocks from showing up at the widget areas.

Conclusion

WordPress 6.0 brings important changes to website owners. These changes make it easier for people to create their own site visually and customize it as they see fit. WordPress 6.0 is another small step to make WordPress a site editor, like Wix or Squarespace. However, there’s still a long road ahead but let’s be optimistic. Gutenberg editor will keep improving and unlock more and more options for site owners. As a result, WordPress can grow as well.

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Social media presence can help you build trust in your visitors. Being active in social media tells people you’re a real person and they should do business with you. In other words, when a visitor sees your Instagram posts on your website, they’ll look at your profile. They’ll see your posts and know you take your business seriously. So, a slider from your Instagram images and videos can get you more sales!

How to create an Instagram slider in WordPress?

The simplest way of creating an Instagram slider in WordPress is to install a plugin to help you. But there are many plugins available to help you create a nice slider from your Instagram posts. Unfortunately, lots of these plugins limit you in some way. For example, they let you create sliders with a limited number of layouts. If you don’t want any limitations, give Smart Slider Pro a try!

So, how do you get an Instagram slider up and running on your site? Follow these simple steps:

1. Install Smart Slider Pro
2. Create a new slider project
3. Click on Add new, choose Dynamic Slide and find Instagram
4. Set up your Instagram app and request a new token
5. Choose the content your slider should display
6. Create your beautiful slides based on your Instagram content

Need more detailed instructions? Check the dedicated documentation on how to set up the Instagram generator.

Why should you use Smart Slider to create an Instagram slider?

Smart Slider is the most popular responsive slider for WordPress. The Instagram slider generator has finally arrived at Smart Slider! From now on you can create beautiful sliders from your Instagram posts. In fact, Smart Slider does not limit you to predefined layouts to create your slider. So, you can create simple image or video slides. But you can also add the date, time and caption of the post in the layout you want. Actually, all sliders you create from your Instagram posts can look completely different. How cool is that?

To learn more about creating an Instagram slider in Smart Slider, be sure you watch our detailed tutorial video below.

Inspiring Instagram Slider templates

Every time we release a new feature to Smart Slider, we add inspiring new templates. These templates help us to showcase the new feature. Additionally, they’re very helpful to inspire you to create something awesome. To show the power of the Instagram generator, we created not one, but two new slider templates.

Instagram Slider

The Instagram Slider template helps your visitors focus on one single post at a time. So, they can view the image you posted to Instagram in a large size. Next to the image you can find the post’s description, partly covering the image.

Instagram Carousel

The Instagram Carousel displays your posts in a more traditional manner. Instead of displaying one slide at a time, the visitors can see more slides next to each other. A carousel like this allows the visitors to quickly browse the slides to check your images.

How to use a template slider in your generator?

Smart Slider comes with a great number of gorgeous slider templates. These templates don’t use any dynamic slides, so all users can import and use them on their site. This might raise the question: how to make the template slider use dynamic slides? It’s pretty simple, you just need to follow the steps below:

1. Import the template you want to use
2. Go to one of the slides and copy it
3. Create a slide using the Instagram generator
4. Paste the slide you copied before
5. Replace the copied content with the Instagram generator’s variables
6. Remove the slides from the template

Be sure to check out the documentation article for detailed instructions.

Conclusion

The Instagram generator is an awesome addition to Smart Slider. Instagram is one of the biggest social media platforms. As a result, it’s one of the best tools to raise brand awareness. Now that you can bring your photos and videos from Instagram to your website, you can use the power of Instagram to build trust. And building trust is one of the most important factors of creating a successful website.

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Comparing the changes

We have made many adjustments to the dashboard, some smaller and some bigger ones. Here’s a screenshot that shows the previous dashboard (left) and the new one (right). It’ll make it easier for you to visualize what has changed.

There are many things to see here, so let me help you highlight the most important things you should be looking for. First, we have moved every button, the Order by, Create Group and View Trash, to the top left side of the dashboard. Additionally, they all got a cool new icon to visualize their purpose. Staying at the top part, there’s a search field on the right-hand side. This is where you could find the View Trash button before.

If you look under the list of sliders, you can see a new row. They’re related to the pagination and help you navigate better in the dashboard. First, you can see a status indicator on the left side. It shows which sliders and groups you see and how many sliders you have in total. In the middle you can find the actual pagination. This is where you can see which page you are on or navigate to some other pages. Finally, the last new thing is the filter option. This is where you can select how many sliders you want to see on a single page.

What do you need to know about the new pagination?

We have created the paginator with two things in mind. First, to improve the user experience by making the dashboard easier to see through. Second, to make the dashboard load faster, as it will only load a limited number of slides. After all, if you have a hundred slides, it’s a lot faster to load only the first 10 or 25 of them. Not only does the paginator make the dashboard load faster, but it will also make it more organized.

Changes in Manual ordering

If you select the Manual order option, you can drag’n’drop any slider to a new place. For example, you can move the sliders you edit the most frequently to the first couple of places. However, if you use pagination you can only order your sliders on the current view.

To be able to move a slider to a different view you’ll need to select the Show all filter first. Then you can drag’n’drop your slider anywhere while all sliders are visible. Finally, change the filter back to the value you prefer. The slider you moved will be in the correct place now.

What do you need to know about the Search feature?

Being able to search for a specific slider was a frequently requested feature. In fact, it was one of the features we wanted to use the most on our website as well. Since we have more than 180 sliders and groups on the dashboard, it’s tough to find a specific slider. The high number of sliders can make it difficult to find any slider. So, we wanted to create a search feature for a long time now.

Using the new search feature you can quickly find any slider you have created. It doesn’t matter whether the slider is somewhere in your dashboard or hidden in a group. To search for a slider, simply type its name into the search field. Additionally, you can search for slider IDs as well.

New Shape Dividers are available

Apart from the amazing new dashboard features, we have also added a couple of new effects. Shape Dividers are modern design elements that help create a cool transition between sections. We felt it’s time to add a couple of more modern looking shapes, so we have added 6 totally new shapes. You can add all shapes to both the top and bottom of your slides.

Conclusion

The new search and pagination features seem like small changes. But they are super useful and will significantly improve the user experience. The search option will make it easier to find sliders wherever they’re hiding from you. The pagination will make the dashboard load faster and look a lot more organized. Additionally, the new Shape Dividers help you give your sliders a modern touch.

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https://smartslider3.com/blog/year-in-review-2021/ Mon, 03 Jan 2022 06:00:12 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=44469 This year was anything but normal; we had to find new ways to work, and continue doing what we love. Although it’s hard to keep track of all changes that happened this year, I decided to give it a try anyway. First of all, we’re happy to announce that a new face joined our team […]

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]]> This year was anything but normal; we had to find new ways to work, and continue doing what we love. Although it’s hard to keep track of all changes that happened this year, I decided to give it a try anyway. First of all, we’re happy to announce that a new face joined our team this year to help with the development and support of our softwares.

But before anything else I would like to thank all of our customers (that’s you!) who use Smart Slider on all their clients’ websites! Thanks for allowing us to be a part of your year! We’re thrilled by the amount of positive feedback we receive from you and it helps us to continue and make our plugin better and better.

Now let’s take a look back at what we’ve accomplished over this year.

Overview

In this section I’ll try to gather the most interesting statistics, numbers and insights about how we did as a company in the past 365 days.

• Updates: In 2021 we’ve released 1 major and 17 minor updates to Smart Slider.
• Blog: We’ve released a total of 15 articles in 2021 which helped us get lots of new visitors from organic sources. Our goal for 2022 is to increase our content output while maintaining the same high quality so make sure to subscribe to our newsletter.
• YouTube: We’ve created a total of 10 new videos in 2021. Two of these videos are part of our How To Build series, which focuses on building template sliders from scratch. Three of the videos are related to the new layers added this year, and the others are more generic tutorials.
• New Template Page: Smart Slider has many amazing slider templates. We’ve rebuilt the template page to make it more modern and added the most needed search feature.

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Smart Slider

Smart Slider 3 is our flagship product, and currently it’s running on 800,000+ WordPress websites. It’s the fastest growing slider plugin in the WordPress repository. Here’s a quick summary of our biggest releases from the last 12 months:

• Smart Slider 3.5 – Blazar: A major update bringing you the best frontend performance possible. This new update helps make the slider load faster, and you can get a better score in Google PageSpeed Insights as well.
• Slider Templates: In 2021 we’ve created 23 brand new slider templates for you to use. Additionally, we’ve improved the description of every template, so they now highlight the most important features you can find in the slider.
• Morph and Distortion animations: Today’s modern websites call for modern effects and animations. The Morph and Distortion animations help you create that sophisticated look for your site.
• Before After effect: After the amazing performance improvements we’ve managed to find the time to add a few new layers. One of these was the Before After layer, which helps you add the popular before-after effect to your slider.
• Countdown Layer: The Countdown layer helps you count down to a specific date, such as the opening of your site, the start or end of a sale and much more. It opens up many doors to create things with Smart Slider that were not possible before.
• Gutenberg Block improvements: Gutenberg is aiming to be the best WordPress editor with its flexibility and fast loading speed. We’ve made some improvements in the way our Gutenberg block behaves, so the experience is more fluid. Also, directly from the block you can go to the Slider settings page and edit the published slider.

What’s Coming Next Year?

We promise to bring you incredible updates that aim at making your lives easier through simplified WordPress and Joomla website building. We couldn’t be more excited for 2022 and you’ll really like the features we have in the pipeline. But here’s a list of our public roadmap:

• Dashboard improvements: Smart Slider is a super versatile tool, and many people create lots of sliders using it. After some time the Dashboard can be crowded making it hard to find sliders. We’re working on some major features to improve your experience. We’re planning to add a search and a paginator to the Dashboard.
• Instagram generator: We were super excited to learn that after Facebook had taken over Instagram, they made improvements to the Instagram API. As a result, it became possible to create an Instagram generator which will help you pull your images on Instagram directly to your slider.
• New Shape Dividers: Shape Dividers are a trend. They look cool and modern and allow you to create seamless transitions between sections of your site. So we decided to add a couple of new Shape Dividers to choose from. This will help you find the perfect shape for your website.
• Lottie integration: Lottie is a modern way to show animations on your site. We’re excited to bring the possibilities of Lottie to Smart Slider!

As always, we love hearing what you’d like from us next year. Your thoughts directly influence what we decide to work on, so please fill out our quick survey to help us meet your expectations in an even better way.

Take The 2 Minutes Survey

Final thoughts

2021 was a super busy year for us. We’ve had fantastic growth and I’m really proud of the work we’ve done. We have high plans for the future, so stay tuned, because many cool things are coming! Once again, from all our team: Thank you for your support and we’ll see you in 2022! 🎉

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https://smartslider3.com/blog/introducing-countdown-layer/ Tue, 07 Dec 2021 08:31:15 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=43581 Smart Slider is a plugin you can use to create beautiful and responsive sliders. Additionally, it’s full of stunning features to enrich your site with. Furthermore, features help you create a memorable experience for your visitors. Today we’re proud to announce that a new layer has arrived in Smart Slider Pro. This effect opens up […]

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]]> Smart Slider is a plugin you can use to create beautiful and responsive sliders. Additionally, it’s full of stunning features to enrich your site with. Furthermore, features help you create a memorable experience for your visitors. Today we’re proud to announce that a new layer has arrived in Smart Slider Pro. This effect opens up more possibilities for you to use Smart Slider on your site. From now on you can create cool countdown timers using the brand-new Countdown Layer.

What’s a countdown timer?

A countdown timer is a visual timer that counts down to a specific date. It’s a popular way to count down to something you’re looking for. For example, you can use it on your maintenance page to tell the early visitors when your site opens. Another favored way to use countdowns is to get ready for an upcoming sale. Similarly, you can use a countdown even if you are already running a sale. Using a countdown you can let your buyers know how much time they’ve got until the sale is over. As a result, you can urge them to buy your products or services.

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The Countdown layer has arrived!

The Countdown layer has arrived at Smart Slider Pro in version 3.5.1.2. After updating, you can add a countdown to any slide. This layer is a great way to create a visual timer that you can add to your slider. To create a new countdown layer, simply open up the layer list and find the countdown layer under Special.

New template sliders

Every new Smart Slider feature comes with gorgeous example sliders. There’s no difference with the Countdown layer either. To show the strength of the new layer and to inspire you, we’ve created not one, but 3 slider templates. Let’s take a quick look at them.

Bonsai

The Bonsai template is a slider that counts down to new product arrival. It features a CTA button to learn more about the products until they’re available.

Dance Festival

The Dance Festival template is a spectacular way to count down to the start of the festival. The background video fills the template with life, the layer animations amaze the visitors and the countdown gives the final touch.

Coming Soon

The Coming Soon template helps you create an announcement that you’re working on your site and it will be ready soon. It helps raise excitement and create a memorable experience.

Looking to jump into slider design but don’t know where to start? The How to Build video series is a great first step. These videos cover the basics of slider building: slider settings, controls, layers, layout, and responsive settings.

Conclusion

Smart Slider is full of amazing effects you can use on your site. Recently we have added the Morph and Distortion animations and the Before After layer. In the 3.5.1.2 version we added the Countdown layer for our Pro users. This layer is a great addition to the tons of cool things you can do with Smart Slider. In fact, it opens up many doors to create things that were not possible before. What’s the first countdown you’ll create?

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Most important changes

The template page got a new and fresh design, which looks clean and more modern. Just looking at the new page it’s obvious what a huge improvement it is. Additionally, it’s a lot lighter and fits into the design of our website more.

There are some aspects of the new template page that are worth looking into. So, let’s take a look at the most important changes!

New Design

Looking at the new template page the first new thing you’ll see is the design. The thumbnails are a lot bigger, which makes it easier to get a glimpse of the slider behind them. Also, the slider titles are immediately visible now. Before this, they only showed up when you hovered over the thumbnail image. Additionally, the slider thumbnails look a lot closer to Smart Slider’s own Dashboard.

Better category list

Another crucial improvement was to re-imagine the category list. Every slider template has their own categories that describe their most important aspects. For example, the Fullwidth Slider is in the following categories: Full Width, Layer Parallax or Highlighted heading.

From now on we display the most important categories on the left side of the template list. These categories let you browse sliders by their type, layout or price. For example, the type category lets you browse sliders by their overall look. You can browse between simple sliders, blocks, showcases, carousels or pages. At the layout you can choose whether you want to see full width, full page or boxed sliders. Additionally, each category displays how many sliders you can find in them. Very cool new feature, right?

Search

Smart Slider has tons of templates. At the time of writing, a total of 133 sliders are available and it can be hard to find the perfect slider for your needs. We know this feeling and were keen to make the process of choosing the slider easier for you. As a result, we created a smart search to make your lives easier.

Need to find a slider? Simply type in what you’re looking for and flip through the results. Didn’t get the result you were looking for? Feel free to let us know so we can improve the search system.

New import page

Another change worth noting is a UX improvement. If you used the old UI, you probably remember how the import process worked. You had to hover on the thumbnail of the slide you wanted to import and click on the button. Clicking anywhere else on the thumbnail did open the slider in a new browser tab. But this action was not obvious at all, and many people could miss it.

We decided to make this a bit more user friendly as well. From now on if you hover on the slide thumbnail for import, it will display two buttons. First you’ll see an eye icon to view the template. Second, you’ll see the actual import button. It’s a lot more user friendly and we hope it will help you choose the perfect slider for your site.

Conclusion

Smart Slider has always had an incredible amount of slider templates to choose from. They help you create good looking sliders fast, as they let you change anything on the templates, including texts and images. We’ve always kept the list of the slider templates curated and added many new sliders over the time. For example, when we added a new feature, such as the recent Before After layer.

In the future we’ll keep adding new and new sliders for you to use. So it was a good time to improve the template page to help you find all the amazing templates. Got a new template idea for us to add? Drop us a line!

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https://smartslider3.com/blog/before-after-slider/ Tue, 26 Oct 2021 06:24:51 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=42837 We know how tough it is to stand out from the crowd. For this reason, it’s our goal to always add new, stunning features to Smart Slider. These new additions can help you create amazing sliders with spectacular effects. Recently we have brought you the Morph and Distortion animations. Today we’re excited to announce another […]

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]]> We know how tough it is to stand out from the crowd. For this reason, it’s our goal to always add new, stunning features to Smart Slider. These new additions can help you create amazing sliders with spectacular effects. Recently we have brought you the Morph and Distortion animations. Today we’re excited to announce another new feature. Starting from 3.5.1.1 you can create a Before After slider with Smart Slider Pro.

What is the Before After layer?

The Before After layer is a simple and effective way to show two images in the sample place. Think of it like having the two images below one another. You can select which one you want to see by dragging a line shaped separator tool on top of the pictures. The first image displays completely when the separator is at the right side. Similarly, the second image displays when the separator is at the left side.

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What’s the purpose of the Before After slider?

The before after slider is the perfect tool to create a visual comparison. For this reason, there are many cases when you can use this effect. A photographer can use a before and after slider to display their skills. For example, they can show how well they have colored a black and white photo.

Another typical use case is to show off two stages of a transformation. For instance, when someone changes their hairstyle they can use a before and after photo to show it. Another use case is to demonstrate the results of a new diet or workout routine.

The Before after layer has arrived at Smart Slider!

We’re excited to announce the release of the stunning Before After layer! With the 3.5.1.1 update, the new Before After layer is available for the Pro users. This layer allows you to create gorgeous before and after image sliders. Simply add a new Before After layer, select your images and your effect is ready. It’s important to note that you can create a Before After slider using a layer. The Before After images were meant to be part of the content, so they can’t be the backgrounds of a slide. As a result, the Before After layer works with all slider types.

Why should you use a Before After slider? Well, it’s super versatile, so you can use it to achieve many things. You can, obviously, display two images to compare them. You can also add labels to each image and a caption to describe what the layer is about. Additionally, you can choose whether you want a horizontal or vertical comparison.

Before After slider examples

Every new Smart Slider feature comes with inspiring example sliders. There’s no difference with the Before after layer either. To show the strength of the new effects and to inspire you, we’ve created not one, but 4 slider templates. Let’s see a quick overview about them.

Product Compare

Although it’s called Before after slider, you can use it for much more than just to show before and after images. In fact, you can use it for product comparison as well. For example, if you sell clothing you can use a Before After layer to show two color variations of the same product.

Diet Block

A Before After slider is perfect to display transformation. One of the most typical cases of such transformation is to show the results of a new diet or workout routine. Using the Before After layer you can easily show such transformations on your site.

Photo Compare

The Photo Compare template is a great way for a photographer to allow visitors to compare the pictures they took. At this template we used monochrome and colored images, but you can use anything else you’d like. For example, compare shots you took at different times of a day, like a sunset or sundown photo.

Renovation

The Renovation slider is a bit closer to the traditional way people think of the Before After slider. It displays two stages of the renovation. The starting stage, before the renovation happened, and the finished result.

Conclusion

Not a long time has passed since we brought you the Morph and Distortion animations. Now we have brought you another amazing feature, the Before After layer. It’s another great addition to Smart Slider Pro. You can use it to create stunning sliders you could never create before. When will you start creating Before After sliders?

The post Introducing Before After Layer appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

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What are Distortion animations?

Distortion animations are liquid-like transitions between images. You can create stunning glitch transitions made with WebGL to catch your visitors’ attention. Unlike the Morph animations, they affect the whole image simultaneously. Although they still look super modern, they’re a bit more fun looking.

Where to find the new animations?

The new animations are available in 3.5.1 of Smart Slider Pro. To take advantage of them make sure you update first! Once updated, select a slider and go to its Animations tab. Please note that background animations are only available in the Simple slider type.

Real Life Morph and Distortion animation examples

Every new Smart Slider feature comes with inspiring example sliders. There’s no difference with the Morph and Distortion animations either. To show the strength of the new effects and to inspire you, we’ve created a slider template. This time we’ve chosen a movie theme and we’re using the Distortion – Flow effect on the background images. What’s the result? Check the demo and find out!

Oh, and by the way, we revamped some old templates to use the new effect. Do you need more inspiration to use these new animations? Be sure to check these revamped Morph and Distortion templates, too!

One of the sliders we chose was the Cosmetics slider, which uses the Morph – Wave animation when you switch slides.

The Organic Food template takes advantage of the new Morph – Brush animation to create a stunning slide changing effect.

The Photo Story template’s most important part is its large and gorgeous images. We choose the Distortion – Storm animation to make the slider more stunning.

We wanted a more subtle animation for the Top 5 Products template, so we chose the Distortion – Mosaic effect. This effect looks absolutely ravishing on this modern full page slider!

Conclusion

The Morph and Distortion animations are amazing additions to Smart Slider. They’re cool and modern effects which will help you create more beautiful sliders than ever. The 4 Morph and 8 Distortion effects let you experiment and find the animation that suits your site the most. Start using the new effects today!

The post Introducing Morph and Distortion Animations appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.