Soliloquy Documentation

Documentation, Reference Materials, and Tutorials for Soliloquy

Dynamic Addon

Would you like to create sliders instantly? With Soliloquy’s Dynamic Addon there are several quick and easy ways to create sliders on the fly and we can show you how!


Requirements

Installation

Please follow our instructions on how to install and activate addons.

In this instance, you’ll be activating the Soliloquy Dynamic Addon.

Setup

Step 1 – Edit Soliloquy Dynamic Settings

First, you’ll want to set up your Soliloquy Dynamic Slider. This slider will be used as base settings for all dynamic sliders on your site.

Simply edit the Soliloquy Dynamic Settings and create the options you wish to use for your dynamic sliders. The options you see here will depend on what addons you have installed on the site.

Edit the Soliloquy Dynamic Settings slider to setup and use the Dynamic Addon

Step 2 – Configure your settings

Your next step is to set up your dynamic settings. Simply navigate through each tab of the slider and create your base settings that will be used for all dynamic sliders.

Step 3 – Publish the Soliloquy Dynamic Settings slider

Once you’ve adjusted your settings, click Publish or Update on the slider to save the changes.

Outputting a Dynamic Slider

As shown below, there are several examples of how you can use Soliloquy’s Dynamic Addon.

Wherever you see id="custom-XXX", make sure to change that ID name to a unique number.

No dynamic slider should have the same ID number on any page or post.

Output the Current Page/Post/CPT’s attached images

To use this type of a dynamic slider, you’ll first need to create a new page or post on your site.

Then just click the Add Media button to upload images to your post.

An image will only be considered attached if it’s directly uploaded to the post.

Once you’ve uploaded your images, click Publish on the post.

Get the ID number of the post, you’ll use this number for your dynamic slider.

You can see the ID number of the post once you’ve published the page. For example, if the URL shows this https://yoursite.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=123&action=edit, your dynamic shortcode would look like what’s shown below.

Simply add your shortcode to the page and click Update. When you visit the page and you’ll now see the dynamic slider.
Shortcode:

[[soliloquy_dynamic id=”123″]]

Template Tag:

soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => 123 ) );

From specific images in the WordPress Media Library

Install and activate the Show IDs plugin so you can easily find your image IDs to use these in your dynamic shortcode.

You’ll then see a list from the Media’s List view of the actual image ID in the ID column.

Find the ID of the images you want to include in your dynamic slider

Shortcode:

[[soliloquy_dynamic id=”custom-XXX” images=”600,601,602″]]

Template Tag:

soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => 'custom-XXX', 'images' => '601,602,603' ) );

Specific images by URL

Did you know that you can also create a dynamic sliders based on the URL of the images?

If you were, for example, storing your images on a cloud service, all you’d need to do is add the URLs for the slider images to create this type of dynamic slider.

Shortcode:

[[soliloquy_dynamic id=”custom-XXX” images=”http://placehold.it/600×300,http://placehold.it/500×300″]]

Template Tag:

soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => 'custom-XXX', 'images' => 'http://placehold.it/600x300,http://placehold.it/500x300' ) );

Output all images from a folder in the WordPress Content Directory

This way is a little more technical as the others as it requires direct access to your server files by creating directories inside your /wp-content directory.

If you’re not sure what that actually means, it may be best to find an different option for creating your dynamic slider.

Shortcode:

[[soliloquy_dynamic id=”folder-slider”]]

Template Tag:

soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => 'folder-slider' ) );

Notes:

  1. The folder name begins after folder-; in the example above you would need a folder called slider inside your wp-content folder.
  2. Folder must be directly within the wp-content directory e.g. wp-content/slider. Subdirectories (wp-content/slider/slider) will not work.
  3. Files within the folder must not contain spaces. For best compatibility, stick to alphanumeric characters.
  4. JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF images are supported.
  5. Performance may be slower than adding your images to a Soliloquy Slider — this should only be used for a small number of images.

This is likely the easiest dynamic slider you can create.

If you’ve spent countless hours setting up your WordPress galleries then you really don’t want to new sliders to replace these galleries, all you need to do is edit the gallery from the Text and add soliloquy="true" to the end of your WordPress gallery.

Add soliloquy equals true to the end of the WordPress shortcode from the Text tab to convert a WordPress gallery into a Soliloquy dynamic slider

Shortcode:

[gallery ids="123,1234,12345,123456" soliloquy="true"]

Template Tag:

The WordPress Gallery feature doesn’t provide a pure template tag option, however you can still use it within your PHP files using do_shortcode(); as recommended by WordPress’s documentation:

echo do_shortcode('[gallery ids="123,1234,12345,123456" soliloquy="true"]');

Slider from your NextGEN galleries

It’s just as easy to also create a dynamic slider from your NextGen galleries as well. All you need is the NextGen gallery ID number and it’s easily done.

You can find your NextGen gallery ID by going to your WordPress Admin » Gallery » Manage Galleries.

Get the gallery ID of the NextGen gallery

Shortcode:

[[soliloquy_dynamic id=”nextgen-3″]]

Template Tag:

soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => 'nextgen-3' ) );

Slider from your Envira galleries

As with NextGen, you can just as easily create a dynamic slider from an Envira Gallery. But also like NextGen, you’ll need the gallery ID number.

Just go to WordPress Admin Envira and get the number from the shortcode column.

Get the Envira Gallery ID number
Shortcode:

[[soliloquy_dynamic id=”envira-258″]]

Template Tag:

soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => 'envira-258' ) );

And that’s it! If you’d like to learn how to create a video slider, check out our article on How to Add Videos to Soliloquy.


FAQs

Q: What should I do if I’m having trouble using template tags?

A: We recommend that you take care to check that the soliloquy_dynamic function exists before outputting it in your template files. It would be output like so:

if ( function_exists( 'soliloquy_dynamic' ) ) soliloquy_dynamic( array( 'id' => '176' ) );

Be sure to wrap it in beginning and ending PHP tags if necessary.


Q: Can I still add captions to my images?

A: Of course! Just add your captions from the WordPress Media Library.

Changelog

2.3.4 (04-14-2022)

  • Fixes: Sort ASC not working.
  • Fixes: Minor bug fixes.

2.3.3 (12-11-2018)

  • Fixes: Dynamic data reset after deactivation.
  • Fixes: Minor bug fixes.

2.3.2 (2016-08-31)

  • Added: default tag to use options from other sliders
  • Added: Captions for attachment id using the caption="my caption"
  • Fix: Multisite

2.3.1 (2016-07-07)

  • Fix: Saving the Dynamic Slider causing sliders to not display

2.3.0 (2016-06-21)

  • UI Refresh

2.2.6 (2016-02-23)

  • Added: fr_FR Translations

2.2.5 (2015-10-22)

  • Added: links shortcode / function parameter, which accepts a comma separated list of image links to correspond to the comma separated list of image IDs

2.2.4 (2015-07-30)

  • Added: Support for remote image URLs

2.2.3 (2015-07-16)

  • Added: Support for images in folder within wp-content directory

2.2.2

  • Fix: NextGen 2.1.x+ compatibility

2.2.1

  • Fix: ID not set on some Dynamic Sliders due to soliloquy_dynamic_queried_data filter
  • Fix: Some users received 2.2.0, so this ensures they do not miss this update.

2.1.9.1

  • Fixed bug with 2.1.9 release and sliders not working.

2.1.9

  • Added: Return on soliloquy_dynamic() function when $return is enabled
  • Added: Refactored Filters to allow other Addons to add additional Dynamic Slider support

2.1.8

  • Added: Support for Envira Galleries

2.1.7

  • Added: Link parameter can now be ‘post’. When clicking images that are attached to a Post, Page or CPT, with this parameter set, the user will be taken to the images Post

2.1.6

  • Fixed bug where image alt tags were not being output properly.

2.1.5

  • Fixed bug where images were linked by default (defaults to no link now).
  • Fixed bug with mapping transitions from v1 to v2.
  • Fixed bug where the exclude parameter did not work properly.

2.1.4

  • Added backwards compat support for image cropping within shortcode/template tag parameters.

2.1.3

  • Fixed regression in link states for slides (defaults to no link).

2.1.1

  • Fixed bug with outputting HTML tags in NextGen dynamic slider captions.

2.1.0

2.0.1

  • Improvement of checks for dynamic slider on activation.

2.0.0

  • Say hello to version 2.0!