Customizable Banner widget

CM1 Ideas and Feature Requests
1

There have been a couple of discussions in the community about jQuery banners seen here:

https://community.percussion.com/t/home-page-banner-configurations/295

https://community.percussion.com/t/how-to-add-a-slider-to-my-homepage/1138

But these relate mostly to hand coded sliders and gallery style jQuery shows.

I’d love to see a banner widget included in CM1 that leveraged some built-in jQuery script with wired settings so that the user could drop the widget into place and have the following customizable settings:

  1. Style of slider transition (wipes or pushes, dissolves, or other transition effects)

  2. Content overlay option. Many B2B and educational sites benefit from having a home page or landing page banner with some level of overlaid navigation or other textual content.

  3. Fileds for option 2 above to enter heading text and links.

  4. Fields for option 2 above to select style of buttons for links

  5. Optional descriptor text for each slide image.

  6. menu to select image for each slide.

  7. slide duration

  8. other speed and transition settings could be added over time. Many jQuery slider scripts have countless settings to customize the slider.

Here is an example of what my banner looks like in CM1:

This is a simple content slider that has slide out caption tabs on the left, a header for each image that dissolves in when the main image dissolves in and then the description at the bottom slides up from the bottom. That description has a link to the page for, in this case, “Industries”.

2

The Widget Builder provided in Version 3.3 provides the ability to create widgets such as these. You can see the instructions for creating one here: Creating a Panel Slider

3

I don’t see the widget builder truly being able to be used for a custom slider/carousel until it get some updates including non-required fields (would enable the contributor to decide how many slides) and additional field type like select or checkboxes, etc. But I can easily see these things getting added in the near future.

Also would like to add, while I have used slider banners (a.k.a carousels) myself, their overall effectiveness in promoting content is very poor. Typically the first slide is the one that will get hits, the others will get very few. I personally feel they have a place in which one uses them for means other than content promotion, and if they are designed keeping in mind many of the points outlined by brad frost in his link below…

Here’s some resource links to consider:

http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/car…

http://weedygarden.net/2013/01/carous…

http://shouldiuseacarousel.com (designed to show the frustrations of users when trying to use carousels)

http://www.newbrandvision.com/News/Ne…