Active Content Slider

No matter whether you just created a new store or want to bring some novelty to your successfully functioning website, the Active Content Slider Magento extension will make your site pages attractive and eye-catching. With this powerful module, you can rotate different banners or text messages and inform your customers about new products, discounts or just congratulate your visitors with some holidays.

Having installed and configured Active Content Slider on your store, you can see the slider on the frontend, e.g. like the following:


The slider block consists of:

• the block with content
• the navigation arrows
• the navigation buttons

Active Content Slider allows placing several blocks on one page. You can also display one slider on different pages of your Magento store. All blocks are easily inserted via CMS or widget. If you run 1.4* store, you can use WYSIWYG editor while creating Active Content Slider block.

Features

• Stylish design
• Great performance
• Ability to insert pictures as well as any HTML content including other widgets
• You can page slides horizontally, vertically or using fade effect
• Ability to insert slider via CMS or widget
• Automatic Slider Code generation
• Automatically hiding controls
• Slideshow
• Roller captions mode
• High cross-browser compatibility due to jQuery
• Easing effects
• Paging in both directions
• Easy-to-use interface
• Easy 2-minutes installation
• Meets Magento programming practices for most versions and customizations compatibility

Configuration

Active Content Slider allows you to use the same text/images in different sliders. So you should create slides at first and then select the required ones in slides rotator.

Slides

To create a slide, go to Admin panel -> CMS -> Active Content -> Slides. Here you should fill in the following fields:

• Slide title
• Status
• Visible in
• Content

Note: if your website is not a multistore, the "Visible in" field won't be displayed.

For proper extension work, you should insert only one image in one slide.

Slides Rotator

To create a slider where required information will be displayed, you should go to Admin panel -> CMS -> Active Content -> Slides Rotator. In the General Information tab, you have to specify the block name, CMS code, its status and size.

In the Properties tab, specify the way the slider content will be displayed:

• Type - the type of the slider paging. It can be horizontal, vertical or fade
• Easing - the type of the Easing effect while paging
• Controls - the type of the “Next” and ”Previous” buttons - horizontal, vertical or disabled
• Pager - enable/disable the display of the pager
• Autohide Controls - enable/disable automatical hiding of arrows and pager
• Roller Captions - enable/disable the roller captions mode
• Slide Show - enable/disable the slideshow mode
• Duration - the time of paging for the slideshow mode and speed for the roller captions mode
• Direction - direction of the automatic paging for the the slideshow and roller captions modes

In the Slides tab, select the slides you want to be rotated in the block by clicking the "Add Slides" button. You can specify the sort order of slides here as well.

Extension configuration

To configure the Active Content Slider extension, go to CMS -> Active Content -> Configuration. There are only two options here - Use jQuery and Use Easing.

These libraries are required for proper extension work. That's why new versions of jQuery and its plugin, jQuery.Easing, are included in the package. If both these libraries or one of them is already used in your store, it will be uploaded once again. You can avoid it by turning off the required library.

Insert Slider

You can insert Active Content Slider block via CMS or widget. If you want to insert via CMS, use the following code:

{{block type="activecontent/slider" code="cms_code" }}

Instead of 'cms_code', use the CMS code value, specified in the General Information tab of the Slides Rotator page.

Legend:
+ Feature
* Bugfix

1.0.4
    + Automatic Slider Code generation
    * Slides are mixed on frontend when size of images is wrong
    * Broken style of the Add Slides window
    * Can't change status of the slider
    * W3C Validation Issue: Document type doesn't allow element "style" in the body
    * Problems during insert image to slide when WYSIWYG editor is deactivated
    * Unnecessary messages in console log on backend

1.0.2
    + Compatibility with Magento v.1.6.2.0
    * Pager displayed incorrectly in IE6, IE7, and IE8
    * Though slide is disabled, it is displayed in the slide rotator

1.0.1
    * Impossibility to specify slider speed
    * Arrows and pager displayed for only one slide
    * Minor fixes