I am very excited to be able to announce that Total Slider 2.0 has been released!

Version 2.0 is a significant milestone in the plugin’s history, and brings a very important behind-the-scenes change to the way your slide information is stored. In addition to that, and a lot of cleanup work in the code itself, there is now the capability of having draft slides as well as auto-saving of those drafts, making it much more difficult to lose data!

Being a side project that has to fit in around my day job and other work, this has taken much longer to get out there than I would have liked, but I am very happy with the result. The particular challenge of making sure the data format upgrade goes without a hitch involved some extensive testing, but I’m pretty confident (about as confident as you can be!) that the upgrade process will be very smooth. In the unlikely event there is an issue, you can roll back the plugin to v1.1.5 without any loss of data. Obviously, taking a database backup is a good idea, though! 🙂

With this big infrastructure change out of the way, I’m looking forward to the future of this plugin. I hope we can deliver more graphical goodness (a slider template previewer would be nice!) and a greater variety of templates that ship with the plugin to support the different preferences people have for their sliders.

It’s really exciting to finally get this released to the 1,000+ active users (according to its WordPress plugin page) this software has, and I’m looking forward to making it even better as and when I can!

You can download Total Slider from the WordPress Plugins Directory.

I’ve been fortunate this week to have a little time to work on Total Slider, my (and Van Patten Media’s) open source WordPress plugin for making those neat little slideshow things, like so:

I have been meaning to get to this project again for a while, so it is great to get a moment or two to give it the love and attention it deserves.

My focus thus far has been on a complete overhaul of Total Slider’s data storage format — away from using wp_option records and using a custom post type.

This change is not only the right thing to do to clean things up and follow best practices, but it opens doors to other neat features that will make Total Slider feel like it fits into the WordPress Way even more. Without making undeliverable promises, I’d love to see automatic saving of slide drafts make it into 2.0! 😉

One of the things I have found that is pleasing is that much of the code I have already written is sufficiently abstracted that ripping out the fundamentals of the data format has been a lot less painful than it could have been!

It is nice as well to use this blog for one of its original purposes, to give updates on the projects I am working on. 🙂

You can follow progress in the unstable branch on the project’s GitHub page.

I’m really pleased to announce that the WordPress plugin I have been working on with Van Patten Media, Total Slider, has now been released!

Total Slider is a plugin for WordPress from Van Patten Media that will transform your experience with sliders forever. Build your own templates in PHP and CSS, then preview the output in a beautiful WYSIWYG interface designed to blend seamlessly with the WordPress core.

Total Slider is released under the GNU GPL version 2 or later. We’d love your feedback, ideas, bug reports, translations and more.

Here is a quick 2-minute video introduction:

You can find out more and download Total Slider from the WordPress plugin directory.