bluelake publications

digital | content | creation

tweeking that jquery slideshow

Coding your website design can be a complex operation to nut out. Translating your concept into the practicalities of screen simplicity.

I’ve procrastinated forever on getting the appropriate slideshow images on some pages, that’s for the 21 pages with the various lists of my huts or blogs on tramping.net.nz. Previously I had some static images that might not correspond to the area being discussed on the specific page. Resolving this was always on my To Do List, just having the clear time to nut it out seemed an issue, always being the next thing to do, until I found another way to occupy my time.

Not any more, I’ve ticked this item off.

Most of my websites have been created using the straightforward, streamlined and open source Textpattern CMS, (Content Management System). The joy of using this system is that if you understand HTML and CSS you can construct your own design, not modifying a template like in Wordpress or the new generation website creators like SQUARESPACE.

Anyway, with the assistance of the exceedingly helpful Textpattern forum this issue is now fully resolved. It was just so simple in the end to change a line to resolve this dynamically:

id="?article_image" to category='<txp: section />'

When you call up a section, or sub-section, page, eg, kahurangi-huts, with a list of the huts in Kahurangi National Park, that line of code calls up an image gallery with the same name as the section, or sub-section, eg, kahurangi-huts, in this case with three hut images from Kahurangi.

Obvious now, but that part took a bit of brainpower even to know what method to use, I’d tried major layers of conditionals but that method would mean every time you add a sub-section, eg, Fiordland, or West Coast, I would have to fiddle around with another conditional.

After the brain stuff there’s a whole bunch of repetitive and mechanical bits. The task was then to select 3 images for each of the 21 article list pages, new images are good, no shortage of possible photos in my image collection.

Then resize, crop and caption the 63 images.

Phew, all done.

author | GJ Coop | posted | 04 May 2014
← four Design Principles, plus another one for free five principles: a guide to Joshua Porter's UX design philosophy →