It’s Now Super-Easy to Add Buttons to MetaSlider Slideshows

There is a new version of MetaSlider available with tons of new features.

When you install this version, you’ll find it much easier to add captions and buttons to your slideshows. There are also new options for carousels, slideshow effects, custom fonts and more.

We’re building the most user-friendly slideshow plugin in WordPress, and this release is another step towards that.

You can now upgrade to MetaSlider Free 3.99 and MetaSlider Pro 2.47. In this guide, I’ll show you what’s new in these releases.

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Improved Caption and Button Options

When you open MetaSlider, the first thing you will now see is the “Manual entry” option. This provides a full text editor for creating captions. You’ll also see a new “Add button” feature.

When you click the “Add Button” link, you’ll see a modal window as in this image below. Here you can add a button into your slideshow.

Click “Insert”, and you have a button that you can place anywhere inside your caption area. This is perfect for adding “Buy now”, “Join today”, “Sign up” or other buttons to your slideshows, which are often in the most important places on your website.

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Custom Fonts in Theme Editor

If you’re using MetaSlider Pro, it’s now possible to show captions using almost any font you choose. Inside the “Theme Editor” feature, you’ll now see a “Font Family” option, as in this screenshot below. This feature uses Google Fonts. You can choose from 1,000’s of different fonts.

In this example, I’ve chosen the Kameron font for my slideshow. If you want to host these fonts locally for privacy / GDPR concerns, you can do that with a plugin like “Local Google Fonts“.

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Better Carousel Options

In MetaSlider, a “Carousel” means showing multiple slides on the screen at one time. Here’s our full guide to carousels. Inside MetaSlider, this feature can now be enabled or disabled with a single checkbox.

Once you enable the “Carousel Mode” option, you’ll now see all the related options. For example, you can choose to loop the carousel continuously so when the last slide disappears, the first slide shows again. You can also set the margin between slides and the minimum number of slides.

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Ken Burns Effect

The Ken Burns effect was named after the famous documentary maker. Ken Burns uses these animated transitions to add motion to still images and bring the images to life. It’s now possible to add a Ken Burns effect to your slideshows created with MetaSlider Pro. In the “Transition Options” area, you’ll find a new “Extra Effect” setting.

This slideshow has live preview of the Ken Burns effect. I’ve deliberately made the transition slower than normal so that you can see the effect in action.

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Accessibility Improvements

We had more great feedback this month from some MetaSlider power users. They run MetaSlider on 100’s of sites and need to meet the very highest standards of accessibility. This led to some extensive testing with accessibility tools including Lighthouse, Axe Dev Tools and AccessibleWeb. Here is a sample of the accessibility improvements:

• Added focus indicators on images with link and Play / Pause buttons.
• Cleaned up the aria-labels to avoid duplication.
• Improve the list structure in slideshows to better support screenreaders.

There’s a lot more of these in this last release. Please contact us if you have any accessibility feedback. We’re determined to make MetaSlider the most accessible WordPress slideshow plugin.