It’s here, it finally happened – Serious Slider got blocks support (a single block for now). Our slider spent some (quality?) time in the workshop lately – the kind of time that involves scattered notes, half‑finished prototypes, multiple git branches and a lot of muttering at screens and punching the keyboard – and it’s finally ready to show off its new block‑powered persona.

You’ll now find a proper slider block right inside the block editor, complete with slider selection, individual slides previews with images and titles without having to wander off into separate settings pages. The slider even insisted on having its own complete set of localisable options separate from the main slider’s configuration, giving you endless choice in the many visual personalities you want each slider to show off to the public. And for those who easily forget or misplace things, we’ve added quick links so you can teleport back to the regular slider and slides management interface.

The block-related changes also required centralising all the options management under a single (larger) roof – making it easier for us to add new stuff in the future – while also forcing us to optimise how the slider-specific styles and scripts and enqueued, now that each slider can have multiple (split) personalities of itself.

Of course, no update would be complete without discovering at least one existential threat lurking in the codebase. This time it was recursion – the slider attempting to display a slider inside a slider inside a slider, like some sort of digital resonance chamber. To prevent the block editor from collapsing into a slider‑shaped singularity we added necessary filtering to the content. This does mean shortcodes inside slide content have been retired and are no longer supported, but we consider it a small price to pay for preserving the structural integrity of the universe.

Changelog:

v1.4.1

• Fixed stored XSS vulnerability allowing an authenticated user (with at least contributor level) to inject unfiltered data through shortcode attributes – reported by WordFence (#462586)
• Fixed fatal error in inc/blocks.php with Plesk WP Toolkit Scan and WP-CLI use
• Hardened validation of shortcode attributes, slider ID in widget call, image list in slider generation code, option values in taxonomy parameters

v1.4.0

• Added block functionality with slides preview and options control
  • The slider block can be customised with local options separate from the slider’s set options
  • Full control of all the slider options through the block editor panels
  • Quick links to the (classic) slider and slides management sections
• Optimised slider-specific styling and JavaScript generation and enqueuing processes
• Added recursion protection in slide content output (mainly to protect against slider-within-slider in the block editor) – this removes shortcode support within the slide content
• Rewrote the slider meta options interface to make use of the new centralised options code
• Bumped required WordPress version to 5.0 as that’s the minimum version integrating blocks functionality