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Hi,
This is the idea I had in mind.
The existing experimental test site setup I have uses JA Hedera with a slideshow and a custom module to show an article as a testimonial, which being an article is fixed.
What would be a nice effect is that if several testimonials could be in another slideshow, each linked to the main one in a synchronised manner, such that when the main slide changed the testimonial changed to the one relevant to that slide.
I see that JA Slideshow in JA Social has a setting to show a description text over the slide image. This certainly has the facility to overlay more information, however, I think a side-by-side display is a better layout.
I didn’t envision the child (slideshow2) slide changing whilst the master (slideshow1) remains in show. But this feature would be very flexible and enable very creative slideshow displays.
As I said in my initial question, I realise this layout style could be done using graphic design where each slide image in a single slideshow has an area for extra text or image, but synchronised slideshow modules would give more options for using images and articles.
Tom, thanks for the moral support.
Any pointers on the code that triggers the manual/auto slide navigation in JA Slideshow?
It occurs to me that having a common navigation event handler feeding two slideshows may be an approach.Malc
OK, I’ve played around with the two slideshow modules in the JA Social demo having them both active on the home page. They seem to sync changes together ok, so now I would like to position the two of them side-by-side in the content-mass-top block.
I read the JA T3 Framework 2 Developer Guide and tried cloning and modifying a layout as below to see if I could get the inset2-left block to embed in another custom block “myblock”.
<blocks name="middle" colwidth="22">
<blocks name="myblock" style="xhtml">
<block name="content-mass-top" style="jaraw">content-mass-top</block>
<block name="inset1">left</block>
</blocks>
<block name="content-top" type="spotlight">user1,user2,user3</block>
<block name="right2">right</block>
</blocks>This didn’t work at all. Probably because I didn’t define the “myblock” properly or maybe because I used nested <blocks> tags. Unfortunately the JA T3 Wiki does help on this kind of layout change.
I read that customising the JA T3 Framework should be done with the layout xml files rather than the default.php layout, but I could use some guidance. Do I also need to modify the default.php?
The below image describes what I’m trying to achieve. Pointers on how to do this would be appreciated.
What xml layout or default.php modification can achieve this?
TIA
Thanks Himangi,
I experimented with your code suggestion and eventually got the layout I was looking for :). As you can see there are still styling issues I need to resolve in order to get a clean look, but the layout is effective as shown by ?tp=1 and Firebug.
I would never have worked this one out myself, so thank you. I would suggest that this tip be included in the JAT3 Wiki for others to benefit from. Any other special Block layout tips would be very useful.
Here is what I got so far, with markings. Hope it helps others too.
:(( There seems to be a lot of delay in seeing the changes when a modification is saved and when you see any effect on a live site. Using JAT3 Clean Cache doesn’t really help. The only way I found to force changes to be seen quicker was to use the CPANEL tools select a different layout, apply it, then go back and select my layout and apply it again. Any tips for reducing this latency?
:confused: It just occurred to me after posting the last reply, that I used type=”spotlight” rather than style=”spotlight” as Himangi suggested.
I arrived at using type by looking at its use in another line in the layout code, so experimented with it.
Changing the layout to style=”spotlight” works too but the default slideshow settings somewhere increases the width to force the two of them to wrap to two rows instead of side-by-side.
Any ideas where to change the width settings to get control?
Thanks for the css pointer Phil.
Well I eventually got side-by-side slideshows working but unfortunately trying to use JA Slideshow for this effect proved too cumbersome. Trying to align JA Slideshows horizontally seems quite difficult, as it appears to use js script files as well as css and jat3 core stuff. I couldn’t find a way of stopping them wrapping >:(.
I decided to try using a simple slideshow extension and found one that is based on a plugin that was ideal for my purpose. So rather than use JA Slideshow in content-mass-top I made a custom html module and used this simple slideshow plugin code.
{besps}set1|align=3|width=500|auto=1{/besps}
{besps}set2|align=4|width=244|auto=1{/besps}To get a nice appearance I designed the slides to have background layers that looks like a module style outline. Set1 on the left, set2 on the right.
It turns out that the slide changes between the sets is virtually in sync as far as I could tell. Maybe having a common plugin engine helps.
Here is the eventual look.
After all this maybe you could say it would be as easy to make single slides showing the same images. Probably, but it wouldn’t be as flexible when you only want to change the smaller slide set. Also it wouldn’t be as much of a challenge :laugh:!
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