WP Social Media Slider is a WordPress plugin that allows you to display your Tweets, Instagram Photos, and Facebook posts directly on your website. It’s browser compatible, responsive, and employs lazy-loading for speedy performance. It’s also super customizeable.
I built it because I couldn’t find a good plugin to display tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram photos all in the same slider.
That’s basically the backstory. I had a client that wanted to display their tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram posts all in the same feed. I searched for a long time, but couldn’t find a tool to do it–at least not like I wanted to.
So I decided there was only one solution: create a plugin for the task. Thus the idea for WP Social Media Slider was born.
It’s compabitable back to IE8, it’s responsive, and it lazy-loads.
Browser compatibility was important to me, so I decided early on that I would make sure that it was compatible back to IE8. For this reason (and a few others) I opted to use Owl Carousel 2 as the backbone for the slider. (By the way, I can’t say enough about how great Owl Carousel 2 is; much of the credit for the functionality of WP Social Media slider goes to its author(s)). At this point, WP Social Media Slider is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE 8-11.
I also knew that it had to be fully responsive, so I did what was needed to make sure that the slider loads well on phones and tablets as well as desktops and laptops.
Finally, I realized quickly that the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram API’s can be slow at times, resulting in slow page loads if you “wait” for them. My solution to this problem was to employ lazy-loading: the process of loading the posts via JavaScript after the page loads. That helps to ensure that the pages load as quickly as possible; the page load isn’t held up if Facebook is being slow.
It’s easy to customize. Or completely overhaul.
There are tons of ways that you can customize WP Social Media Slider. There’s huge flexibility because you can customize:
- The style via CSS
- The posts loaded via the options
- The actual HTML via custom templates
- The outputted content via filters
- The slider via all of the Owl Carousel 2 options
By combining a couple of those techniques, you can get a slider that looks like just about anything. Honestly, you can pretty much just take the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts that are loaded in PHP and do whatever you want with them; the sky is the limit.
The documentation for the slider gives a lot of information regarding the customization.
Download the ol’ fella.
There’s a free version on WordPress.org that only includes Twitter, but if you’d like to unlock Facebook and Instagram–as well as technical support–snag a copy of the full version for $15. If you’d like a discount, you can share the plugin during checkout for 20% off.
Thanks!
Pete Molinero