Stuck at DDblock advanced Slideshow video tutorial (Fixed)

Just ignore this part if you are using the default view and content type. This information is only useful if you want to configure your own custom content type and/or view.

The video asks you to download a script at http://ddblock.myalbums.biz/download by clicking a link called Export_files_V1.6.zip. This zip file contains scripts that can be used to to automatically create a content type (News item) and an associated view, as well as the preprocessor functions that you are supposed to paste into template.php.

What I meant by "Default" was that you should not have to worry about the customization section of the video unless you wanted to create your own content type and view manually yourself (not using the scripts for these tasks). If you import the scripts (as it shows on the video), you should be able to skip the customization section of the video.

That is the theory. Now here is the fact.

The script for creating the content type and view works perfectly. However, the preprocessor script doesn't work as expected. There are field names contained in the preprocessor script that you are supposed to paste into template.php. These fields have names like node_data_field_pager_item_text_field_image_fid. Unfortunately, these exact field names did not exist for me, which made for exciting hours of watching nothing happen.

In order to solve this problem, I had to uncomment the four lines in the preprocessor functions that you pasted into template.php that start with "drupal_set_message..." (as decribed under the aforementioned customization section that you are not supposed to have to watch). After saving your template.php file after uncommenting this lines, when you hit the page that contains your dynamic display block, the relevant variables are displayed. You have to hunt and peck through the variables to find the variables that look similar to the ones in the preprocessor functions (like node_data_field_pager_item_field_image_fid) and replace the original variable names in template.php. This is about as fun as snorting thumbtacks but, if you can slog through it, the code actually works after that.

#4 Thank you for explaining this. I think your explanation is very clear.

#3 When you still have issues, please attach the result of the debug lines, your template.php and a link to the Internet site, so we can help you better.

You can also have a look at the FAQ (advanced slideshow troubleshooting part) or other similar issues in the issue queue (search on all issues).

Hope this helps you further, please let me know.

This is probably caused by your overall theme CSS. You can adjust the CSS for the h2 tag in the CSS of the ddblock theme (custom\modules\ddblock\upright10\ddblock-cycle-upright10.css).

div.ddblock-cycle-upright10 div.slide-title h2{
  background-color:none; 
  margin:-5px 0 0 0; 
  padding:0;
}

When you want to make sure it overrides other h2 CSS settings you can put !important.

div.ddblock-cycle-upright10 div.slide-title h2{
  background-color:none!important; 
  margin:-5px 0 0 0; 
  padding:0;
}

Hope this helps you further, please let me know.

Saurabh,

Thank you for your offer to help with documentation.

There is already the advanced slideshow tutorial at: http://ddblock.myalbums.biz/node/747.
There are also other step by step tutorials, see e.g. http://www.kristen.org/content/drupal-galleries-using-dynamic-display-bl....

When you want to help with documentation, I would prefer that you review the existing advanced slideshow tutorial at http://ddblock.myalbums.biz/node/747 and help us to find unclear pages and post suggestions for improvement instead of creating another new tutorial.

We understand that tutorials are difficult to write for all gradations of users (from newbie to experts), so we need to find a good mix in our tutorials. To improve the tutorials we need feedback from users.

Thanks again

Philip Blaauw
Dynamic display block module maintainer

I had some theming issues too. I was only able to resolve all the issues by viewing the source to identify the correct naming and then adjusting the CSS, as ppblaauw suggested. However, I had to create a few new CSS entries to cover some elements that were not explicitly available using pplaauw's prefered method.

dear saurabhi,

I am not a programmer nor expert but follow the drupal instructions. I was working through the video tutorials to install DDblock. As instructed i did all the steps, till copying the preprocessor to template.php. And everything seems fine.

I am using Newswire template. But I am not able to see any thing in DDblock nor I am getting any error messages.

Rest all the things are fine.

Kindly guide.

dear saurabh,

thanks for your reply. my problem is resolved. As u said i did all the things. firstly as per video tutorial they didn't properly mentioned about the themes to be used. In video its shows other template and the custom template was different. So I used gradientblue and same mentioned in DDblock configuration. But then later the DD block appeared with no images.

Then I came across the fact that we have to replace node_data_field_pager_text_field_image_fid by node_data_field_image_field_image_fid.

So its fine now. thanks.

I will be grateful to see ur website.

Changed issue title