A few days ago my oik-nivo-slider finally passed the 80,000 downloads milestone. Hurrah!
[nivo format='E/C']
- When I first released the plugin it was downloaded quite a lot
- The daily download rate has been tailing off
- I think this can be attributed to four main reasons
- Competition
- Ratings
- Perceived bloat
- Less demand for sliders
[bw_more]
Competition
The jQuery upon which the slider is based is no longer as advanced as some of the other sliders available.
Nivo only animates the image in the slider. While oik-nivo-slider does support advanced captions it doesn’t do anything fancy to animate them.
Perhaps I should do another review to see what the other sliders offer.
Ratings
In 2013 the oik-nivo-slider was dependent upon the oik base plugin, and the oik plugin came bundled with quite a few others. This was perceived as bloat ware, so users gave oik-nivo-slider a low rating, even though they didn’t activate the plugins delivered in oik.
What they didn’t appreciate was the advanced features of the solution that were made possible through the use of oik’s lazy smart shortcode technology.
If you happen to be using the nivo slider, but haven’t yet given it a rating, then please can you consider doing so. Add your review Pretty please. I would of course prefer 4 and 5 star ratings.
Perceived bloat
Even though the bundled plugin in oik have been unbundled I think there is still a problem with perceived bloat due to the dependency on oik.
If a plugin is dependent upon another plugin it’s more often than not considered to be a bad thing.
I see plugin dependency as a good thing. So long as the code is implemented sensibly, you don’t need two (or more) instances of almost exactly the same logic to deliver the required functionality.
The oik-nivo-slider implementation uses some very powerful logic from the oik base plugin.
It doesn’t make any sense to duplicate it, just so we can have a standalone version of the oik-nivo-slider.
In the near future I may be tempted to make some changes.
- Make oik-nivo-slider standalone… as I did for oik-bwtrace
- Incorporate parts of the nivo shortcode solution into the oik base plugin
- Allow user selection of the allowed shortcodes
Less demand for sliders
More and more sites now target mobile first. They’re not using sliders so much.
I know that oik-nivo-slider takes a little work to make it acceptable on an iPhone 4.