Mate Carousel

It puts a face on the byline. Alone among the Sky Addons for Elementor post carousels, the Mate Carousel renders a 48px circular author avatar with the writer’s name beside it and the date stacked underneath, all sitting below a 22px title and a short excerpt. It is built for a related-articles or author-led rail rather than a picture wall.

From WordPress’s own avatar for that user account, requested at 48 pixels and cropped to a circle, so a Gravatar or any avatar-replacement plugin you already run supplies it with no extra setup. Both the photo and the name link to that author’s archive, and the Author style section gives the chip its own colour and typography.

Yes. Select Layout offers Layout 1, which stacks the image above the content, and Layout 2, which flips it so the picture sits under the words. The choice is stored per breakpoint, so a card can lead with the photo on desktop and with the headline on a phone.

One to six, chosen separately for desktop, tablet and mobile, shipping at three, two and one. The Item Gap slider between cards is responsive too and starts at 20px, tightening to 10px on mobile where the card contents already stack into a single column.

Three separate controls. Autoplay switches the motion off outright; Autoplay Speed sets how long each card rests, from 1000 to 10000ms with 5000 as the default; and Slide Speed sets how long the travel itself takes, defaulting to 500ms. For a reading rail, raising the rest time beats slowing the travel.

Usually because it was built while hidden and never measured itself again. The Observer switch, on by default here, watches for the carousel’s container becoming visible or changing size and recalculates the slide widths, which is what fixes a squashed or single-slide carousel inside tabs, an accordion, a popup or an off-canvas panel.

A good deal. You choose the previous and next icons from the Elementor icon library, set size, padding and border radius, and give normal and hover colours including a hover border colour. A position popover then offsets the pair horizontally and vertically, so they can sit inside the track, hug its edges or float above the cards.

Fifteen words by default, set by a word count rather than a character count, and printed at 18px dropping to 16px below 1024px. One thing to watch: if a post has a hand-written excerpt saved in WordPress, that text is used exactly as written and the word limit does not apply to it.

Yes — that is the standard way to build a related-articles strip at the foot of a single post. With Source left on Posts and Ignore Sticky Posts at its default, tick Current Post under Exclude By and the article being read drops out of its own carousel. Adding a term under Include By narrows it to the same category.

The Mate List keeps the avatar card but stands it still: one to four columns, row and column gaps, optional numbered pagination, and a third Default layout that runs the image and text side by side at fifty-fifty. The Carousel trades those for motion, up to six across, arrows and bullets. Both are free and neither needs Elementor Pro.