Aspen Themeworks Show Posts and Aspen Themeworks Show Sliders are now available in the first Release Candidate versions.

There are some significant changes to the Show Sliders Admin page that may require changes to your previous settings for image sliders.

Show Sliders Changes

• The default (free version) display for image Titles, Captions, and Descriptions is now to show them above and below the image instead of overlaying the image. The default for Captions is now off, so you will have to check the option to enable captions display. If you want the overlay Title and Captions, you will need to check the appropriate Pro options. One side-effect of this change is that Titles and Captions now look nice for Carousels by default.
• Carousels don’t support any Thumbnail based paging. Turns out they never really did, even though the options let you add a sliding thumbnail pager to Carousels. Some of the other options also never worked with Carousels, and have been disabled for them.
• Support for custom Thumbnail pager images is completely changed for images derived from posts (either Slider Posts or standard posts) instead of galleries. If a post has a Featured Image, the FI will be used as the pager images. This makes adding an image for a Video, for example, very easy. Sliders from the “gallery” shortcode will use the Media Library thumbnail image for the pagers.
• Source for an image’s Title and Link has been changed. If the images originates in a gallery, the Title will be the title specified in the Media Library, and the link will be to the attachment page. If the image originates from a post, the post’s title will be used, and the link will be to the post. Any caption and description come from the Media Library definitions as before. Images that aren’t in the media library can’t have captions or descriptions.
• The layout and order of many options have been reorganized. I think they make a lot more sense now, and should be easier to figure out.
• Nested sliders are detected and prevented.
• The full set of easing methods are now available.
• More complete instructions for adding a header banner slider to other themes is now included in the help file via building a child theme.

Show Posts Changes

• Added option to allow shortcode support by standard text widget. Many themes already include this (e.g., Weaver II and Aspen), but many don’t this allows [show_posts] and [show_slider] to be used in sidebars without the need for a special widget.
• Improved the Help file. The help file for both shortcodes comes with Show Posts.