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Slide Deck 2 WordPress Slider Plugin Review

The Slide Deck 2 WordPress plugin will allow you to create unlimited beautiful content sliders on your website. It’s one of the easiest to use plugins out there and comes packed with all kinds of awesome features.

Slide Deck 2 Features

Slide Deck has tons of great features that make it highly customizable and user friendly. Below I’ve highlighted some of the top features of the Slide Deck plugin as mentioned on their site – I go into these a bit more in detail in the video overview, but just so you can get a general idea of what makes the plugin so special.

Multiple Content Types

One of the best things about Slide Deck 2 and what really makes it stand out from other slider plugins is that it supports different types of slides…images, text, html and videos. And you aren’t stuck to any specific slide type, you could have all image slides, all videos or you can have a mix of different slide types on 1 slider!

Slide Deck Content Types

When you go to create a slide simply select it from a dropdown and all the settings for the slide type will appear so you can easily customize that slide style to your needs.

You can have slides with…

  • Images
  • Text
  • HTML
  • Videos

Easy WYSIWYG editor

All the options and settings when creating your slides with Slide Deck are done via an intuitive custom UI that’s very easy to use. You can add captions or body text to any slide, select between multiple layouts for your slides, easily upload and/or delete images, choose between predefined styles or make your own, drag-and-drop your slides…etc.

Slide Deck WYSIWYG

Live Preview

The best things about Slide Deck in my opinion is the live preview. As you work on creating slides the plugin will show a live preview of your slider right there in the dashboard so you can see exactly what it’s going to look like on the front end. If you edit a slide, drag the slides around, change your lens (slider style)…etc, you can see all those changes on a live slider that you can test out. This will ensure that when you go to post it on the front-end, it looks perfect!

Slide Deck Preview

Responsive

Slide Deck recently updated their plugin to be fully responsive. This means that if you are running a responsive WordPress theme you won’t have any issues using this plugin as well. I tested the responsiveness on their demo and its not bad. Of course with any content slider its not going to be 100% perfect responsively – but lets be real, any website on a mobile device isn’t going to look as good as the default full-size site.

Slide Deck Responsive

If you head over to SlideDeck they are running an awesome 25% off promotion due to this new update

Slide Deck Video Overview

The awesome people who created Slide Deck (Digital Telepathy) have provided me with the premium version of the plugin so I could test it out and show you guys how everything works. At first I was a little overwhelmed with all the options and settings, but it only took 10 minutes to get familiar with the system since it’s so intuitive. In the video below I wanted to show you how one would create a slider using Slide Deck and just a quick browse through the options and some of the key features. I really loved messing with the plugin, personally I don’t have a use for it, but maybe you will!

I didn’t want to go into huge detail regarding every little setting included for each Slide Deck and individual slide styles, because the plugin is really massive and it would be the longest video ever. I hope if you watched the video you got a good sense on how easy the plugin is to use and how feature packed it is. I personally really like the live preview while customizing your slide deck so I really wanted to show that in the video – just describing the plugin doesn’t really do it justice, you really have to see it in action to appreciate it!

My Thoughts

The only thing I would have liked to see was if the UI was a bit more tuned into the default WordPress UI, some of the colors/buttons simply look out of place. I am a huge fan of using as many built-in styles as possible and keeping things as close to the WP UI as possible. That said, this isn’t really an issue (and yes it looks beautiful) and some people on the other hand might really like the modern/sleek look of the plugin.

Overall I think the plugin is really great. I didn’t run into any sort of bugs or issues when testing out the plugin and getting familiar with the way it works was super quick – I didn’t have to read any documentation as everything just simply makes sense. I like the fact that the plugin has preset styles for adding captions and such to your image slides, the text-only slides I am not a huge fan of, video slides are really great and useful and of course I really like the HTML slide because its perfect for advanced users that want a bit more from the slider.

Get Slide Deck

Click on the button below to head over to the official site to learn more and get this awesome plugin and start making great sliders for your site! The personal version starts at $49 which is a great deal.

Disclaimer: WPExplorer may be an affiliate for one or more products listed in the article. If you click a link and complete a purchase we could make a commission.
7 Comments
  1. GoWebBaby · 12 years ago

    Really very useful plugin for slider. Thanks for sharing this information with us.

  2. Brandon Martin · 12 years ago

    It’s a terrific slider from an aesthetics standpoint. The WordPress integration is also superb. The problem is the pricing. Ouch.

  3. AJ Clarke · 12 years ago

    Ya, it is a bit pricey…If you want something a a lot cheaper you should have a look at the Slider Revolution, it’s quite nice.

    • pierpaolopalazzo · 11 years ago

      Hi AJ Clarks, congratulation for all your works, one question I am looking something like slider revolution for pytheas, I need text on top of the slides, could you suggest something? Is slider revolution compatible with pytheas? Thanks a lot.
      P

      • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

        Slider Revolution would work with any theme. If you look in the Pytheas theme panel in the sliders tab there is a field “Slider Alternative” you should be able to insert the shortcode there for your homepage slider using a plugin like RevSlider. But also you can insert the sliders manually in your template files, in your post content..etc. You shouldn’t have any issues.

  4. pierpaolopalazzo · 11 years ago

    Hi AJ Thanks for your answer, one simple question just to clear my mind. In the pytheas theme slider (slides) is it possible to use a caption (text) on top of the picture? Thank you very much. P

    • AJ Clarke | WPExplorer · 11 years ago

      By default the caption is to the side, to do this you would need to tweak the theme. But of course anything is possible, given you know how to do it 😉

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