Often when building a WordPress site, I want to fill some feature requirements with a plugin rather than do the custom coding. The WordPress community is great for having zillions of plugins available.

I may have one specific use case but some of the best-known plugins are loaded with features that I don’t need. I understand that this fills a different demand as well as upsell to a premium version.

When a plugin does too much

Example, I wanted to drop in a simple image slider to the homepage of ShowWiz.ca, a vendor and craft shows aggregator service, and while trying out a plugin I saw that it kept blowing the memory stack. Why? It was trying to populate a drop-down with all of the custom posts for a feature not even available at the freemium level. Well ShowWiz has tens of thousands of event posts so this was an issue.

When you need a hammer, not a Swiss army knife

After trying several image sliders, I found that they all either didn’t work well, or had too much bloat for my need. I decided to write my own no-frills slider that did nothing but make a series of images slide by on the screen, drawing from a custom post/taxonomy source.

I ended up with a responsive image slider that has no external dependencies, uses pure CSS, and weighs in at half a kilobyte – far lighter than any of the major image slider plugins.

I present to you No BS Image Slider. Try it out if you need a light image slider.

I will be continuing in this style of light single-feature plugins as I encounter a lack of plugins that are a fit for my specific needs. I’m not looking to unseat or compete with big brand WordPress plugins, merely to fill a niche area where they aren’t the best fit.