Today at Tailor we have been working on a few new promos that we are going to be launching next week.  Part of the launch will include a facelift to the Tailor Web Design homepage.  Our team wanted to add a slideshow, however, we didn’t just want just flat, static images. 

We really wanted four or five slides with a background image that had selectable text and the ability to add HTML on top and then style as desired with CSS. This of course would let us quickly create custom buttons and other cool add-ons on a slide to slide basis outside of the plug-in without the need for a clunky and limiting interface.

This would allow our front-end programming team the ability to quickly create a new slide, upload the background image, create the HTML and CSS and then insert it into the existing slideshow with out having to modify any PHP or Javascript (which us “Frontenders” are not to found of : )

Obviously slideshow plug-ins abound for WordPress, but astonishingly after searching for over an hour, we were not able to find a plug-in that did exactly what we wanted!  Now this would be understandable if we had just limited our search to the WordPress plugin depository, however, we were looking to utilize some of our commercial plug-ins we have licenses for, such as the well know Slideshow suite from PluginBuddy and Slidedeck from Digital Telepathy.  Yet still, no one has such a plug-in that allows you to add straight HTML in the dashboard over a background image and combine it in a slider.

Considering that most plug-ins are designed for “do-it-yourselfer” blogger with limited coding skills I should have guessed this would be the case.  So the solution?  Tailor Web Design will be creating our first plug-in!  Ok, actually it is not our first plug-in, but it will be the first plug-in that we are going to be creating for commercial release.

We will be spending the month of February really building out the features and will be putting up a small companion site with documentation and the ability to purchase the plug-in.  We have not yet set a price as we have much development to go, but we are guessing it will range from $49-79 if we really go all out or $19-29 if we keep it more basic.

Suffice to say this has gotten me thinking about all the other types of plug-ins we could be creating, so don’t be too surprised if we release another few come March.  I’ll keep everyone up-to-date on our progress and would appreciate any feedback people have about what they want in the perfect slideshow plugin for WordPress.