Here is what I did just in case anyone wants to copy it noticed a lot of people looking
set a category of your choice and featured image will be the slide for that
title will be displayed and the whole thing is permalinked
here is the HTML/PHP to generate it
<div id="slider">
<ul id="featslider">
<?php
$portquery = new WP_Query();
$portquery->query(array('cat'=> 3, 'posts_per_page' => 4));
while ($portquery->have_posts()) : $portquery->the_post();
echo "<li class="featslide" id='feat-".$slidecount."'>";
echo " <a href="".get_permalink($post->ID)."">";
echo '<span class="slide-title sosmed"> '.the_title('','',false).' </span>';
?>
<?php if (has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ): ?>
<?php $image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ), 'single-post-thumbnail' ); ?>
<?php
echo "<img src="".$image[0]."" />";
?>
<?php endif;
echo "</a></li>";
?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="featslide-nav" class="slidenav">
</div>
</div>
CSS you will probably need to modify this according to your sizes
#slider{
height:348px;
width:800px;
overflow:scroll;
overflow-x:hidden;
position:relative;z-index:5
}
#featslider{
list-style-type:none;
margin:0;
z-index:0;
}
.featslide{margin-top:-22px;}
#featslide-nav{
z-index:100;
position:absolute;
margin-top:-24px;margin-left:700px;
}
.slide-title{
z-index:10;
color:#000;
padding:6px;
min-width:250px;
text-align:center;
background:#fff;
position:relative;top:30px;
font-size:22px;
}
.slidenav a{
text-decoration:none;
color:#fff;
background:#000;
padding:5px;
margin:2px;
cursor:pointer;
}
Then the jQuery
//SLIDER CONTROLS
$("#slider").css("overflow", "hidden");
$("ul#featslider").cycle({
fx: 'fade',
speed: 3000,
timeout: 6000,
pager:"#featslide-nav"
});
based off of this blog post about making an html slide from jquery cycle
http://line25.com/tutorials/build-a-simple-image-slideshow-with-jquery-cycle