I was speaking with another member of the community about general DotNetNuke stuff, and the conversation turned to modules. It was mentioned that there wasn’t a single known open source module that offered the ability to integrate content sliders or banner rotators into your DNN website. There are of course a ton of ways to implement such a feature. Snowcovered has numerous modules that allow you to do this. So, I decided to create a nice and easy one for the Forge.
What is a Content Slider?
A content slider or banner rotator are generally the same thing. They allow you to have image-based content displayed in front of your website visitors in a way that’s interactive and saves space. This is because it rotates some of your most important content in a single spot, for your website visitors to see.
In the beginning, this kind of feature was only available through specialized Flash objects. However, now this feature can be done in a mobile-friendly and non-Flash method using JavaScript – or in this case, a jQuery plug-in.
We should have all seen a content slider on a site or two at this point. In fact, the default template in DotNetNuke 6.0 uses a content slider on the “Getting Started” page. This slider is written so well, I decided to use it as my starting point for this module. The jQuery slider plug-in is called Cycle, and comes with a ton of functionality.
What’s in this Release?
This release of the Content Slider Module has a minimal feature set, but it is fully functional right now. About the only thing that I was thinking about putting in right now and didn’t was the ability to re-order the sliders. I will tackle that in a subsequent release.
You can add as many sliders as you want. Each slider is simply an image that is located either in your DNN file system, or remotely. It even works with the DNN 6.0 file API and DNN system icons. You can edit each icon, giving them names, add a pager element, and more.
Using the slider options, you can configure nearly every single feature that the Cycle plug-in has to offer – affording you the greatest level of flexibility that you can possibly have, without having to necessarily know a bit of JavaScript.
At the end of the day, this module aims at saving you time and effort while allowing you to have that really cool “slider” or “rotator” feature on your website.
Download the Content Slider Module
This entry is cross-posted from my personal blog site.