thank you Josh for the quick response 

i deactivated the plugin (saw that i have a newer version to update so i did it as well) and activated it, the slider template still doing the same and not showing the preview and still crashing the site. i created a new template and made it a grid view and... it works great!

hopping to get a solution for the slider

Thank you

Same isue and nothing seems to fix it. i tried creating a new template with 0 editing and just saved it as is and still. tried to paste the code in a text widget and same thing. no problem with the badge