Naive Carousel

Restrained on purpose. There is no dark scrim and nothing overlaps the picture except a small category pill tucked 15px into its corner; below it sit the title, a light grey author and date line, a 25-word excerpt and an outlined Read More button. It is the plainest of the Sky Addons for Elementor post carousels, meant to sit under body copy without competing with it.

Yes. Button Text replaces the default READ MORE with anything you like, an icon can be picked from the Elementor library and placed before or after the words with its own spacing slider, and the button gets a full style section — padding, typography, border and radius, separate normal and hover colours and backgrounds, shadows, and an Elementor hover animation. It always links to the post itself.

One to six, held separately for desktop, tablet and mobile and shipping at three, two and one. Below 768px each card also stops splitting its image and text and stacks them in a single column with a 24px gap, so a three-across desktop rail becomes one readable card on a phone.

On this widget, usually yes. Pause On Hover ships off across the Sky Addons carousels, which is fine for a decorative image rail but awkward here, because every card carries a Read More button and an excerpt — a slide moving out from under the cursor mid-click is the most common complaint about autoplaying post carousels.

A lot. Bullet height and width are separate sliders, so bullets can be dashes rather than dots, and a radius percentage rounds them from bar to pill to circle, with spacing between them and distinct idle and active colours. Switching the type to a progress bar swaps all of that for a single thickness slider and a top or bottom position.

It should not be, because Strip Shortcode is on by default and removes shortcode markup from excerpts the widget builds out of post content. If raw brackets are still appearing, the post almost certainly has a hand-written excerpt saved in WordPress — that text is printed exactly as entered, and neither the word limit nor the shortcode stripper touches it.

Yes. Under Include By choose Terms and search for the categories or tags you want; the widget groups your picks by taxonomy and builds the query from them, so you can combine a category and a tag and get only the posts carrying both. Exclude By works the same way in reverse, and both can be mixed with an author filter.

Yes. Video Open has three settings: the default lightbox, an identical explicit Lightbox option, and Media File, which turns the play button into a plain link to the video URL with an optional new-tab switch. Stay on the lightbox and you also get aspect ratio, an entrance animation, lazy loading, autoplay and mute.

No. The Naive Carousel is part of the free Sky Addons plugin and runs on Elementor free, with the query builder, the Swiper motion settings, the Read More button and every style control included. It also does not need a separate slider or blog plugin alongside it.

The Carousel offers only the two stacked layouts — image above the text or image below it — and moves. The Naive List adds a third, Default, which runs the image and the text side by side at half the row each with a 34px headline, holds one to four static columns, and can be paginated. Same card language, one moves and one does not.