Featured Content Slider for Frontpage

[Geoff Strout]

Does anybody see the Featured Content Slider on the Frontpage of Ning Creators?

 

This is a pretty cool feature for helping highlight and enage the community around specific content. 

Is there any way for those of us running a community to add something like this? 

If its good enough and valuable enough for the Ning Staff, isn't it good enough for us Community Creators to use too?

 

It's just a fancy way of displaying a news item with a graphic adjacent to it. 

 

Essentially its just a different set of CSS markup with a some javascript included. 

In the Ning blogs and forum posts there is already a fixed markup structure existing. We see it displayed because the associated CSS is fixed. But does it need to be?

 

What we need is for a modular way to assign special CSS and some associated Javascript to the markup of posts we mark "Featured".

 

I've already seen something like this available over at Netvibes.com. 

Their basic news module offers about 6 different ways to display the contained News items and photos. Anywhere from a strict "Text-only" news item to a "Slideshow", to a "Magazine" layout.

 

 

These are all options that would make constructing an attractive Ning Community Frontpage much simpler and easier.

 

If the coding sounds prohibitively difficult, there are even some open-source versions of the same sort of thing on the Wordpress platform using jQuery for the Javascript side.

 

There's the Featured Content Gallery:

and there's WP Slideshow Gallery:

 

 

Any ideas?

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Speed Racer]

you might find Kris' tutorial on slider hero boxes to be just what you need

[Therese Leger]

Great Idea. Especially since my ad boxes don't even work. I was going to try and use my ad boxes for doing something similar to what you've posted about at the very least.

[Geoff Strout]

I read the tutorials posted previously. But the methods offered still seem like glorified 'hacks'.

 

The ubiquitous Wordpress solutions often seem to pull their content directly from the contents of the sites blog posts tagged "Featured" rather than the site manager having to constantly update the images and text in order to get new featured content.

 

There's already a built in "Feature Content" option. What I'm proposing is that the Developers simply make an option for this "Featured Content" to automatically be displayed in a "Featured Content" Slider on the main page.

 

Why should the "Featured Content Slider" and the "Feature Content" function be separate?  

 

Again, we shouldn't have to be hacking this together. This isn't a Free ad-supported system like Blogger. Its not an Open system like Wordpress. This is a Commercial Web-Service that ostensibly someone behind the scenes is paid a good salary to constantly develop!

 

And we're paying that salary. 

 

It's odd to me that listening to the user's requirements seems to rank so low on a priority list here. 

 

[Geoff Strout]

Bump

[Speed Racer]

here is a new one built by a Nintg employee-its pretty nice.

http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/how-to-add-a-slider-to-your

 

FYI this isn't Wordpress, you can't expect it to work the same. Not everyone wants it to work in the way you suggest. Those aren't "hacks". Those are simply different scripts that work in different ways, and it's quite flexible as to what you can put in them.  You are free to create (or pay someone to create) a script that could pull in your featured content, or you could possibly go put it together with one of the suggested scripts here. A script that works in that manner sounds quite handcuffed to me, having the flexibility to put whatever you want from your network into the slider is a much better option. JMHO.

[Nadia Aly]

I used the ad boxes and then used iframes to embed the featured content box.

I used the hero box before and like the new solution much better.

 

http://www.community.scubadiverlife.com

 

Just search for a nice featured content box and build customize it with your content.

The think that sucks is that you have to update it manually.

 

Best,

Nadia

[Geoff Strout]

Nadia,

Thanks for the reply!

 

I like the look of the Featured Content Box on your page.

Do you have to manually upload text and images for each news item each time you want to alter them? 

And it looks like the main site the news items are linked to is a Wordpress site, is that right?

 

Is your Content Slider being pulled from the Wordpress site? ie: Is the Featured Content Box actually dynamically generated from WP and just embedded here?  Or is it a totally separate static piece of code with links going back to the WP site?

 

I'd prefer the dynamic solution myself. I've been looking for a way to embed our Wordpress site's feed as a Featured Content Box for several weeks now. Still nothing.

 

These days it seems a little backwards to keep manually adjusting static bits of code, however I've just about resigned myself to the "Embed it yourself ad infinity" solution.

 

 

 

[Geoff Strout]

I just got back in form a long out of town excursion.  Checking for any possible progress.

[Melon]

Hi Geoff

I'm looking to do the same thing - have a slider that automatically gets filled with featured content. Did you get anywhere with this? I figure there is a way to do this via RSS outputs (into yahoo pipes and outputted as RSS) and then iframing a slider which uses this tweaked RSS to produce the magic automatically. Seems like a bit of work though, keen to hear what solution you deployed (if any!). 

[Heather Lopez]

Here is what I did. I created a Hero box. Then I went to widgetbox (I have a pro membership which is pretty cheap for the year) and used one pro credit to create an rss feed widget slideshow. I used the rss feed from my featured blogpost content. It automatically pulls the top image from the blogpost and you can set the title and content to go to the side. I even was able to add a Twitter share button into it. You can make more tabs, so if you want to have a tab of featured photos, featured videos, etc, you can do that too! When you hover over the content, slideshow arrows pop-up to go between articles. You can set-it to automatically change or remain static. I selected static. Here is a screenshot of what I made it look like on my site:

[Alexander]

Used Zenfolio [http://www.zenfolio.com] to make our slider.
http://uk-christians.net/
it's a very simple way of making one.