This post is about a release of the MetaSlider Slideshow plugin. With MetaSlider Slideshow, you can create a stylish, SEO-optimized slider in minutes.
MetaSlider Slideshow 3.114.0 is a practical update focused on making the plugin easier to use, faster to manage, and more reliable across different WordPress setups. The biggest improvements are in admin accessibility, with better labels, heading structure, and image text for screen reader users, plus faster editing for slideshows with many slides.
Table of Contents
Highlights
- Better screen reader support: Form fields in the slideshow editor, settings area, and slideshows list now include clearer labels for assistive technology.
- Improved heading structure: The Quick Start page, upgrade page, and View Usage window now use a more logical heading order.
- More complete image alt attributes: Admin thumbnails, slide images, and placeholder images now handle alt text more consistently.
- Faster admin editing: The slideshow editor opens more quickly for slideshows that contain many slides.
- Smaller loaded assets: Minified script and style files now load by default, which can help pages load a little faster.
Reliability fixes
- jQuery compatibility: Slideshows are less likely to fail with a “flexslider is not a function” error when a theme loads its own copy of jQuery.
- Lazy Load behavior: Fixes cover hidden slide images, placeholder images replacing unrelated page images, missing images in looping slideshows, and PHP warnings.
- Crop settings: The Image Crop Size 1x setting no longer causes every slide to be cropped again on every save.
- Video slides: The Hide slide setting now saves correctly for Local Video slides even when MetaSlider Slideshow Pro is not active.
- Pro compatibility: Sites using older versions of MetaSlider Slideshow Pro should no longer stop working after updating the free plugin.
- Custom theme previews: Previewing a Pro custom theme before selecting it now shows its custom colors and settings correctly.
Safety and maintenance improvements
This release also tightens several behind the scenes checks in the WordPress admin. Actions that add, update, duplicate, delete, restore, or save slides and slideshows now do a better job of making sure they affect the correct content and only content the current user can edit.
- Safer admin handling: Admin text is escaped before display, redirects use WordPress safe redirect handling, and plugin files can no longer be opened directly.
- Cleaner plugin verification: Cache files are no longer saved inside the plugin folder, which prevents checksum verification warnings caused by generated files.
- Email sign up fixes: Failed sign up attempts no longer count as completed, and trying again after a failure works more reliably.
- Quick Start polish: The Quick Start screen includes updated welcome confetti and fixes the MetaSlider logo placement.
- Companion plugin prompt: The admin now highlights MetaSlider Downloads for sites that want to count and protect file downloads.
One important compatibility note: MetaSlider Slideshow now requires WordPress 5.9 or newer, so confirm your site meets that requirement before updating.
For developers
- Minimum WordPress version: MetaSlider Slideshow now requires WordPress 5.9 or newer.
- Shared helpers: The release adds shared helpers for identifying slide posts and stopping AJAX requests that do not target editable slides or slideshows.
- Asset loading: Minified JavaScript and CSS files now load by default, while development dependencies including Axios were updated.
- Hardening: Admin output escaping, safe redirects, direct file access prevention, and stricter post type checks are now applied more broadly.
This post provides an overview of the new features in this release of the MetaSlider Slideshow plugin. The complete changelogs for both Free and Pro versions are available in our Docs area.
Get the best WordPress slideshow plugin
MetaSlider Slideshow is the best WordPress slider plugin.
You can create stylish sliders using images, videos and much more.