My suggestions would work with most themes because they would need to be developed. My calling my thumbnail presentation scheme a “pagination function” was misleading. At its root, pagination is merely links to other pages. If each page were styled to be primarily an image with some descriptive text, you would essentially have a page based slideshow. The “pagination” still consists of links to various pages. Instead of showing links as page numbers or text, the links could be shown as thumbnails.
Based on your recent posts, I get the sense that creating such a scheme is beyond your abilities, but the fact you’re willing to give it a go if there were a tutorial tells me you are ambitious. I appreciate that, I’m sorry I don’t know of any such tutorial.
I think you might be mistaken about what text search bots can find on a slider. Text does not need to be visible on screen for bots to see it. As you observed, they are text based. They generally don’t bother to check CSS to see if an element is visible or not. If it’s part of the DOM, it’s read. Typically, overlay text and other such modal displays are part of the DOM from the start, it is merely hidden until some user action occurs. It is entirely possible that some plugins do as you suggest and query the DB for every user action, but that would be more the exception than the rule. It doesn’t make sense to make Ajax requests for relatively minor amounts of text whose content is known from the start. Usually Ajax is used for content resulting from user data input (not just action) or for loading large amounts of data (i.e. lazy loading).
Have you evaluated how the plugins manage data by its on-screen behavior or by examining the page source? If not the latter, perhaps you need to re-evaluate the plugins.
The sort of presentation you describe causes me to think of WooThemes Flexslider. They sell a WP Flexslider plugin, but the free download is adequate if you know how to integrate JavaScript into WP. The drawback is there is no backend user interface, the underlying HTML needs to be either manually created or dynamically created by custom template code. Whether the commercial plugin offers more, I couldn’t say. I only have used the free JS download.
On the linked example page, the main slider and thumbnail row are separate HTML entities, you can place them anywhere on a page you like in any order. The main slider can accommodate captions of any kind and size, but you would need to adjust the page’s CSS to get the actual appearance you want. All you are really getting is the JS engine and some sample code.
