Weather you like them or not sliders are still one of the most used elements used on the websites. We have free wordpress plugins, freemium version, and even fully blown out premium ones, but I really only want to look at what you can find for free(Three Freemium) including one just made for the DIVI theme that you may not have seen before.

Meta Slider

This is the first of the freemium slider plugins I will be looking at is Meta Slider by Tram Updraft.  This plugin is very simple to use.

This is a look at the backend of this plugin.  If we look at the slides portion you see an image of the slide, a place for slider caption and a spot for the url redirection when you click on the image.  You can also add in some SEO for each slide as well. You can even swap out the position of each slide.

If we look at the other side of this image we have loads of options.  We can select one of four different slider types:

• Flex Slider 2 – Responsive, 2 transition effects and even a carousel mode
• Nivo Slider – Responsive, 16 transition effects and 4 different themes you can use.
• Responsive Slides – Responsive & light weight slider
• Coin Slider – Comes with 4 transition effects

Standard options for each slider are size and navigation.  Advanced options include slide delay, animation speed, css class.

Now each slider you create includes a shortcode you can use to put it in any post or page you want.  Also includes the necessary PHP code snippet you can add to something such as a child theme.

If you go pro:

The ability to show latest posts or even your woocommerce products.  The ability to add in videos to slider.  The ability to customize the look of the slider with over 25 more settings you can get to change.

master slider

This freemium slider is made by averta.  The free version of the plugin deals with images, thumbnails, and slide info.

This is our fist look at the back end of the plugin.  You can start from scratch or start from one of eight free sample sliders you can edit.  Each sample shows you the base look for the slider.

First we will start off with General settings.  This part deals with slider size, weather it is boxed or full width.

Below that is slider transition settings.

Next we get a bunch  of navigation settings which includes autoplay and mouse wheel navigation.

Appearance settings include such items as skin selection and CSS placement.  Skins change the look of things like the arrows and bullets.

Now lets look at slides.  Up top you see all the slides in the slider and below that is four options:

Background:  For background and thumbnail information
Video and link:  If you want the slide to be a youtube video you can do that or you need the slide to goto a special link
Slide info:  If want to include some text to go along with the image this is the place to put it.
Misc: place for CSS class and id along with slide background color

Now lets take a quick look at slider controls.  Controls are things such as arrows, thumbnails, slide info, etc…  Each control has it own options which included such things such as thumbnail position slide info position, circle timer length.

The final section is for callbacks.  A callback function is a kind of event handler. For each callback you want you can add your custom script in the function,which the slider will execute when the event dispatches.

If you go pro:

You get to add layers to slides, google fonts, post types, woocommerce products, hot spots, loads more sample sliders you can load up, timeline animation tool, and loads more.

Smart Slider 3

This plugin is created by Nextend and is quite possibly the most powerful free one on the market. This one allows you to create regular image slides, video slides, slide of wordpress posts, and even can do layers. This plugin is so NICE it even comes with a DIVI module!

The Smart Slider 3 module is very bare bones. If you click on the module you get an advanced section for CSS. The content section will only allow you to choose the slider you want to display. Now I only showed you it in a standard mode. We also have the same module for full width as well.

The heart of the plugin starts out with a dashboard. You can select a slider to edit. Load one up from the template library, or even create one from scratch. When you click on new slider this pops up:

you can name the slider, slider size, and presets. After you created the slide you get this:

If you click on create slide you can add in types of slides. Image, video, post, empty, and dynamic slides only based on wordpress posts. After you have inserted a slide a whole ton of options show up.

Publish:  Gives you Shortcode, php code and shows you the tiny mce editor icon to click to help insert slider.
General settings to edit:  Name of slider, alignment, background animation selection and more,
Size settings to edit:  Size, height, responsiveness
Autoplay settings to edit:  Is autoplay on, how to stop autoplay
Optomize settings to edit:  Thumbnail size, image quality, background image size
Loading settings to edit:  slider delay length, delay for lightbox
Developer settings to edit:  This includes a Javascript callback section.

And if that is not enough settings to play with you get another group to play with:

Arrows settings to edit: Arrow position, colors, shape and more
Bullets settings to edit:   Are Bullets thumbnails, size of the thumbnails and more.
Autoplay setting to edit:   Show on hover
Textbar setting to edit:  Show on hover
Thumbnails settings to edit:  Show on hover and size
Shadows setting to edit:  none;
Now for each item here you can 100% not use the item.  Just click on the image with a circle.

Now what do you get when you click on a slide to edit.  This is what you get:

You see a whole mess load of options here from this demo slide.  Where the green+  icon area is you see all the layers you can add to a slide: Heading, text, image and button layer.  Click on the green+ icon and you will find youtube and vimeo layers.

We have background, Animation, and settings settings you can edit.  Below save you have duplicate slide and trash slide options.

Background settings you can edit: Fill mode, opacity, background color, and more
Animation settings you can edit:  Add animation setting to the slide like zoom, fade in, etc..
Settings settings you can edit: Title, thumbnail, description and more.

In the top middle of the image we have breakpoint settings you set.

Now this is what you get when you add or edit a layer:

You get a bunch more options here.

Pencil settings you can edit: Link, tag, text and more
Paint bucket settings you can edit:  Font, font size, color, text alignment, normal and hover states, etc…
Cog settings you can edit:  Alignment, position, and more

As you can plainly see this is one very full featured free plugin, but if you move up to the pro version:

You get more layer options
More slide types
Animation Builder
Image editor
Timeline
Way more background animations
And loads more.

RW Divi Unite Gallery

This is a free module by ahmed17.  The plugin here is version 1.0 and when I looked over the plugin we had around 135 files.  Some php files along with a whole load of java script based galleries you can display.

The plugin gives you on new gallery module called Unite Gallery.

If you click on it this pops up:

Now this plugin does not include a lot of settings here.  Advanced is only for CSS.  If you click on update gallery you can add images to the gallery, delete gallery images, etc….   When it comes to skins you only have two of them to choose from.  That changes the look of arrows, bullets, etc…

When it comes to theme though you get many choices,.

And you even get position choices when you choose a gallery type such as grid.  I won’t bog you down with every single look you can get, but I will show you a few.

This one is the compact theme.

This one is the default theme

This one is the grid theme.

This one uses the Alexis Skin.  This one has a lot of rounded squares.  This is one the Grid-Left Theme.

Next up from me I will be looking at plugins to improve accessibility of the website you have for certain users.