How to Build a Simple jQuery Slider

The code in the above example should look familiar. It’s very similar to what we’ve already discussed. The only thing that’s different is that we’ve initialized our slider with a few configuration options supported by the bxSlider library. Let’s have a close look at that snippet.

$('.slider').bxSlider({
    autoControls: true,
    auto: true,
    pager: true,
    slideWidth: 600,
    mode: 'fade',
    captions: true,
    speed: 1000
});

The autoControls Parameter

The autoControls parameter adds controls that allow users to start and stop the slideshow. By default, it’s set to false, so if you want to show controls, you need to set it to true explicitly.

The auto Parameter

The auto parameter allows you to start the slideshow automatically on page load. By default, it’s set to false.

The pager Parameter

The pager parameter adds a pager to the slideshow.

The slideWidth Parameter

The slideWidth parameter allows you to set the width of the slideshow. If you’re using the horizontal option for your slideshow, this parameter is a must.

The mode Parameter

The mode parameter allows you to configure the type of transition between slides. You have three options to choose from—horizontal, vertical, and fade. In the above example, we’ve used the fade option, so you’ll see a fading effect when switching from one slide to another.

The captions Parameter

The captions parameter is used if you want to display a title with each slide. Titles are fetched from the image element’s title attribute. As you can see, we’ve provided a title attribute for all the images in our example.

The speed Parameter

The speed parameter allows you to configure the slide transition duration, and it’s set in milliseconds. In our example, we’ve set it to 1000, so the slides will be rotated every second.

bxSlider has tons of other configuration options—you can learn about them in the official bxSlider options documentation. Go ahead and explore the different options available in the bxSlider library. It also offers a lot of customization possibilities with JavaScript callback methods.

Conclusion

Today, we discussed how you could set up a basic slider using the jQuery library. For demonstration purposes, we chose the bxSlider library, which is built on top of the jQuery library. We also built a real-world example by using a variety of configuration options provided by the bxSlider library.

If you’ve worked with jQuery-based slider libraries, I would love to hear from you! Feel free to share your thoughts using the feed below.