By jimijamesi on

On so many sites these days there is a box on the front page that rotates through the top stories. Like a slideshow with fades and a subnav to show which story is being featured (usually 4 stories)
Usually this is done in flash (pretty easy to build) like on nyobserver.com
but a few sites do this with ajax (lime.com)

Im looking for this type of thing in Drupal using ajax/jquery with no luck yet (jquery/thickbox type of thing)
lets call it a featured story rotation widget

Ideally it would be easy for a non-tech person to update
perhaps it cycles thru the sticky nodes
perhaps it uses images and text
it would need a side/bottom subnav to show story abcd
it would link to the appropriate story depending on which image id currently displayed

Is there such a beast already built into one of the modules in drupal using jquery?
Is it better/easier just to do it up in Flash??

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

StephanieM’s picture

StephanieM commented

I use Node Queue to print a random node on our front page from a half dozen or so. Updating the pool of available stories is as easy as adding them to the node queue. It doesn't do a slide show but will display a different node on each visit.

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

The content management side of the problem is handled easily with nodequeue and views. We have several sites where administrators manage queues of some size, and the views module is used to randomly choose N items from the queue. This is accomplished at page load time and is not refreshed or rotated during the page view.

Using Javascript, it might be possible to dynamically reload a random set of items from a queue by using the pagearray module in conjunction with the dynamicload module (which comes with jstools). I have not tried this. I don't even know whether dynamicload can do periodic refreshes, but I know Team Sugar has done something similar with Javascript.

jimijamesi’s picture

jimijamesi commented

Great suggestions...thanks
The rotating stories (without reloading) however is the key thing for me...
on http://drupal.org/nyobserver i found this tid-bit

The top of the Home and Channel pages feature a slick Flash application which show thumbnails and a larger image from featured articles on the site. The content of this Flash varies by Channel and for home page. All of the content management for these Flash slots is handled in CCK node types. Editors schedule stories into these slots as part of Editions.
.....Drupal’s format_xml_elements() function is handy for generating arbitrary XML.

It seems combining these Ideas (CCK/XML/node queue) with some Jquery / ajax would be pretty slick and very useful for lots of folks... perhaps easier with Flash as done in nyobserver....hmmmmm.... thoughts....