Soliloquy WordPress Plugin Review
Soliloquy is a premium WordPress plugin that will allow you to easily create and manage jQuery image sliders on your WordPress powered website using the very popular “FlexSlider jQuery Plugin” by Woothemes. Often times WordPress themes already come with an image slider built-in but in most cases these themes don’t provide you with all the options for customizing your slider as well as usually the slider is only supported on the homepage or as a one-time-deal on regular pages. What Soliloquy does (and does it quite well) is provide you with all whole administration section for your sliders so you can create unlimited image sliders and also add them anywhere on your site – you could even have multiple sliders on one page!
Soliloquy Features
Speed: This plugin was developed with speed in mind. First of all the plugin only loads files when they are needed, you can select your image dimensions in the slider settings so you don’t have to serve giant images to your viewers and the plugin admin uses mostly default WordPress styles to keep things fast.
SEO: The plugin gives you full control over the title tags for any slide link and images as well as control over the image alt tags. You can also add a caption for extra content to any slide.
Security: Soliloquy was audited by Mark Jaquith whom is a lead WordPress developer and security aficionado. This means your data will be safe in the hands of this plugin.
Interface: The back-end slider administration area is not only very clean and has the same look as the default WordPress UI, but it’s also very easy to use and speedy. There is AJAX support for sorting and organizing your slide images as well as the use of pop-up windows for editing each slide.
Responsiveness: Responsive WordPress themes are gaining in popularity. Soliloquy uses a responsive slider (FlexSlider) so that it will look great no matter where you add your sliders (in columns, widget areas..etc) as well as if you are using a responsive theme your sliders will re-size accordingly to fit your theme’s layout on the various responsive sizes.
Scalability: You can add multiple sliders per page using Soliloquy. Also, there is a built-in function you can use as a theme developer if you wish to use the plugin for your premium themes (you’ll need a developer version of the plugin though).
How To Use Soliloquy
Soliloquy is so amazingly simple to use. In fact I made a quick video showing you how the plugin works so you can see exactly how easy I was able to add an image slider to a post using the Twenty 11 WordPress Theme.
Pricing/Membership/Support
Pricing: I was super lucky and got a Developer License for life for just $100 during a special promotion. But the normal pricing is $20/year for a single support license and $100/year for a developer support license. Both of which are really great and cheap solutions. If you have a corporate site, honestly, what’s $20 for an awesome plugin (that you can write off as a business expense anyway)? And as a developer you could purchase the plugin for just $100/year and use it in your premium WordPress themes and hopefully increase your sales or use it in multiple client websites speeding up your freelance work.
Support: I haven’t personally used their support system but they have support forum where you can submit a ticket and they will help you out. From what I see right now they don’t have a lot of support questions on the forum – probably because the plugin works so well! But if you do come across an issue they are there to help.
My Thoughts
I would definitely give this plugin 5 stars. It works exactly as advertised, it looks great and it’s super easy to use. I’ve tested it on both local and live versions of WordPress as well as on single and multi-site installs without any issues. Before purchasing the plugin I exchanged some emails with the developer and he was really nice and helpful. You just can not go wrong with Soliloquy. Enjoy!
Hi, I found this post on feedly, it is quite solution, somehow i would ever think how am i suppose to put a lot of picture on my post without making my reader pull down the scroll, this is the answer. Impressive shortcode. Would recommend myself onto this plugin. Thank you for the post 🙂
Regards
Ros
Thanks for stopping by 😉 Yes it’s a really great plugin!
Good review and I agree its a great plugin, however, I have a question under SEO. I have just run the site through GTMetrix and it does not slow the site to any significant amount but I am getting that the images height and width attributes are missing.
I have checked but I cannot find anyway of fixing this, can you give any advice?
Thanks
Image heights/widths were something of importance years ago. Now they won’t do pretty much anything in terms of SEO/Speed. Because it’s a “responsive” slider the images can NOT have set widths/heights because then they won’t be fluid. This isn’t something to worry about, imo.
Enjoyed the video AJ – well explained.
I might give the lite version a run out first and see how it goes.
I noticed the caption facility, but can you overlay a block of text say over to the right or left of the image.
I like to use text for SEO value.
Glad you liked it 😉 For the caption, you would just use CSS to tweak the position of the captions. But also there is a “themes” add-on which has some great styles and the one shown on their site “Metro” has the caption on the side like what I think you want.
I was checking out your blog Keith and you’ve got some great content! We’d love to have you as a contributor to our blog 😉 Even if it’s only for 1 post every once in a while. We do pay our contributors as well. If interested you can reach out to me on twitter or go here.
Wow! I found this blog so useful I will use this platform on my WP theme and the caption is so cool. Keep posting your great blogs. I will bookmark you so that when I got home I will read more on your blog.