Featured Items Slider on Showcase Home & Category pages

[Bob]

As per title, You can now easily add a Featured Items slider to Showcase Home and or All Category Pages.

There are separate options for the amount of featured items to display on Showcase Index and Showcase Category pages. Each Category has a option (preset to Enabled) that goes along with the global limit to display Featured Items (so the featured Items slider can be disabled per category).

There are also options to Enable the Module Title Bar, Display Item Title, Item Description and Item Rating/Views. There are separate options for Showcase Index and Showcase Category (applies to all categories).

The slider is standardized throughout showcase... its the same one used for Forum Home, XenPorta, BD Widget, Showcase Modular Layout etc.

Here is a quick look... This is available on List View, Grid View and Article View (Modular already includes it)

 

[Bob]

NOTE: When enabling the slider for the category pages, only items IN that category (to include its children) will display. The HOME page displays ALL Featured Items.

NOTE 2: as shown below, each category has the ability to disable the slider from displaying (when globally enabled).

 

[Bob]

Couple more screen shots as someone asked about what the Module Title Bar is and asked about the options to enable/disable title, description etc...

These are the Featured Items Slider options for the Showcase Index page


These are the Featured Items Slider options for the Showcase Category pages (these apply to ALL Categories)


This is what the Featured Items slider looks like with all options enabled.



And this is what it looks like with all options disabled

 

[Bob]

one last thing..... the Slider left & right arrows are now on "On Hover" event (so they are hidden until you mouse over as shown below).

 

[Alpha1]

Awesome! 2.3.0 will be a very nice one Bob.

 

[3rd angle]

we will usually have long title of showcase ... can the length of the items be limited with dot dot dot just like in description after reaching the limit?

 

[Bob]

we will usually have long title of showcase ... can the length of the items be limited with dot dot dot just like in description after reaching the limit?

The TITLE element in this particular block is 2 lines and was done that way on purpose to allows prefixes and longer titles. I can't use the elipse on a multi line element (its not in CSS yet) and I can't do title cutoff becuase the prefix is not part of the title. So there is just an overflow hidden element.

I've not changed anything about the Modular Block itself in this version. It is the same HTML and CSS that is currently in Showcase right now for the Modular Blocks (for the Modular Layout and the existing sliders for Forum Home, XenPorta and BD Widget Framework). I didn't want to change anything related to the block itself because people have been using this block for years now.


For example, the 1968 Dodge Chargers title is cutoff by the overflow:hidden and you can see with a short title (the 69 Boss 429), that the spacing for the title is still 2 rows to maintain a consistent layout appearance with the other items (height wise).


I should note, its fairly easy to change this behavior to more like the "Grid" layout block. Im even toying around with the idea of having an alternate block layout for the sliders that looks more like the Grid Block.

 

[Alpha1]

In list view I dont think the slider works well. It's hard to see the difference between the slider and the articles. The only things that are different is that the article listing has tabs at the top and the slider has a orange bar. But these are minimal differences and easily overlooked.

 

[Bob]

In list view I dont think the slider works well. It's hard to see the difference between the slider and the articles. The only things that are different is that the article listing has tabs at the top and the slider has a orange bar. But these are minimal differences and easily overlooked.

Not sure I understand what you mean "works well". It does exactly what its supposed to do and that is to display FEATURED ITEMS in a SLIDER. Nothing more, nothing less. It is OPTIONAL, so if you don't like it, don't use it.

Personally, I think it looks the best with List View and Article view. The one that I don't think it looks good with is Grid View (cause both are "block" style layouts). On the other hand, the Featured Articles Slider in AMS is perfect with Grid View and looks OK for list and not so great with Article View (as they are the same).

 

[Alpha1]

Yeah, 'works well' is not the best description. It works perfectly. It could be improved by adding some visual elements that make it stand out from the articles so that its clear that its a different fucntion.

 

[petrolskin]

Will this basically replace the now unsupported XenPorta? Can custom side blocks still be incorporated if so?

 

[Bob]

Not sure I understand your questions as this functionality has nothing to do with XenPorta. I've simply added the ability to add a Items Slider to the top of the Showcase Index and or Showcase Category pages as it was a highly requested suggestion.

 

[petrolskin]

Not sure I understand your questions as this functionality has nothing to do with XenPorta. I've simply added the ability to add a Items Slider to the top of the Showcase Index and or Showcase Category pages as it was a highly requested suggestion.

Badly explained I sent a PM to clarify.

Im having a play with 2.3 Beta and the slider overlay images don't appear to be showing for me on hover. Is it possible to enable animation on these sliders Bob to scroll through the list of items? Ive tried on desktop and laptop and neither show the hover image to manually scroll.

 

[BT012SS]

For me, the hoverd navigation works well....... but only in the original style.
In all other styles i dont see this navigation, as well there are no items or only one to see in the slider.

 

[petrolskin]

For me, the hoverd navigation works well....... but only in the original style.
In all other styles i dont see this navigation, as well there are no items or only one to see in the slider.

Maybe something needs copying over to the other styles? It isnt feasible to revert my site to the default style to enable this

 

[petrolskin]

For me, the hoverd navigation works well....... but only in the original style.
In all other styles i dont see this navigation, as well there are no items or only one to see in the slider.

Just for info Ive resolved this you need to copy over the /styles/default/nflj/showcase images into your custom styles path @imagePath/nflj/showcase images

Works a treat now in both forum list and showcase home sliders.

 

[Bob]

Maybe something needs copying over to the other styles?

ya, that is what needs to happen. Im pretty sure some of the more popular styles will soon have image directories (with images included) for Showcase and AMS (and maybe some of my other addons as well). I've talked to Arty and Mike C and will be talking to Russ and Steve as well.

 

[BT012SS]

Thank you guys
But in the next three weeks i´ve no time to take a look.
I´ve installed the 2.3.0 in my testforum, there it´s no problem.

 

[petrolskin]

Bob is it possible to order items on the slider by creation date? What would be useful is to have items featured then ordered secondary by creation date.

 

[Bob]

no, featured is sorted by random, then last_update. The reason for this is so there is no "bumping" to give more views to the newest/latest featured item.

'featured' => 'rand() %s, item.last_update DESC',

You could change this in the item model, however, it will effect anything that fetches based on "featured"

I may enhance the options in a later version that lets you choose other sort types (like I do with the slider for the home page), however, setting to recent (sort type) would display all items, not just featured. The model doesn't have functionality built in to fetch featured items by various sort types.