Simplest jQuery Slideshow Plugin

This plugin was based on Jonathan Snook’s Simplest jQuery Slideshow script. All I did was take that script, make it generic, optimize it, and wrap it in a plugin.

Demo & Examples

http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/slideshow

Example Usage

Simple

$('.slideshow').slideshow();

Specifying parameters

$('.slideshow').slideshow({
  'timeout': 2000,
  'speed': 300
});

Multiple slideshows in one go

$('.slideshow, .other-slideshow').slideshow();

CSS

The plugin expects all images to be hidden. If you have a conditional js class on the <body> element, you can simply use the following CSS:

.js .slideshow li {
  display: none;
}

This is the fastest and preferred solution.

But if you really want to, you could do this with jQuery instead:

$('.slideshow li').hide().parent().slideshow();

This functionality could easily be included in the plugin, but since it’s way better to just use CSS for this stuff I deliberately left it out.

Avoiding flashing / flickering slides on first load

If you’re using position: absolute to place the slides on top of each other, the first slide you’ll see is in fact the last slide in the HTML. Users without JavaScript enabled will only see this slide.

However, as soon as .slideshow() is invoked, the slideshow will start at slide 1, which is the first slide in the HTML.

To prevent users from seeing the last slide before the plugin is loaded, and to prevent users without JavaScript from seeing the last slide instead of the first slide in the markup, you can use CSS.

The following line of CSS hides all slideshow elements through CSS – until the plugin makes them visible again, that is.

.slideshow li {
  display: none;
}

The first slideshow element, however, can still be visible:

.slideshow li:first-child {
  display: block;
}

Sadly, this won’t work on IE6, since this browser doesn’t support the :first-child pseudo-class. If you want to support IE6 as well, you could add a first-child class to the first slideshow element, and then use something like the following:

.slideshow li:first-child, .slideshow li.first-child {
  display: block;
}

By using these few lines of CSS, slideshow flickering is successfully avoided!

Credits

Kudos to Jonathan Snook for the original script and Michael Eichelsdörfer and Christian Fleschhut for some plugin tips and ideas.

– Mathias

michael-e/jquery-slideshow