Review: Testimonial Rotator

Recently I needed a testimonial slider for a couple projects and I went through several plugins looking for the best one. I wanted something super easy and basic – just a quote, an author, and some arrows. And, of course, it had to be responsive. Not too much to ask, right? Well, seems like all the plugin authors wanted to style the plugins their own way. It took a while before I found Testimonial Rotator, but now I love it!

Simply install it, and go to “Add Rotator” from the new Testimonial custom post type that gets created in your left hand menu. Think of a name to call your rotator (or slider). I called mine “Home Page”, since it was going on the home page of my sites.

Then these are the settings I chose:

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to start adding your testimonials. I used my quote author as the title to make the quotes easy to recognize. The quote will go in the main editing box. Then, don’t miss the new Testimonial Options box added at the bottom that looks like this:

Be sure to select the rotator you want the testimonial to be a part of and add your author’s name.

Then simply go back into All Rotators and grab the shortcode and place it where you want your testimonial slider to appear.

The plugin ask offers a widget option if you’d rather insert it that way.

To style the rotator the way I wanted, I just had to add a few lines of CSS to my style.css file:

h2.testimonial_rotator_slide_title {display:none;}
.testimonial_rotator_quote {font-size:18px; text-align:center; }
.testimonial_rotator_author_info {text-align:center;border-left: 0 !important;} 

You can see my work on the home pages for these two sites:

http://jenniferdawncoaching.com/

Update 6/18/15: Just realized that the widget doesn’t work as well as the shortcode does, but I solved that problem by using the shortcode in a text widget and adding

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

to my functions.php file.