This is a major rewrite which fixed the known issue of not being able to change slides instantly via pagination clicks.

The new version also adds automatic photo caption display.

Enjoy! :)

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A few days ago I was asked to make a simple slideshow. My initial thought was, there must be a ton of solutions available for jQuery. I could easily draw inspiration from them.

I was wrong. Whilst there are a few nicely done slideshow plugins for jQuery, the majority of them are either poorly written or far too complicated.

So, I decided to code my own plugin from the ground up. Meet Slideshow Lite!

The plugin is only tested with jQuery 1.3, but it should also work on jQuery 1.2.

Features

• Unobtrusive JavaScript, simply load it and that’s it
• Clean, semantic HTML structure
• Easy to use
• Customisable
• Free to use or to modify (GPL/MIT dual license)!

Plugin Options

• pauseSeconds (float) – number of seconds between each photo to be displayed
• fadeSpeed (float) – number of seconds for the fading transition, the value should not exceed ‘pauseSeconds’
• width (integer) – width of the slideshow, in pixels
• height (integer) – height of the slideshow, in pixels
• caption (boolean) – display photo caption?
• cssClass (string) – name of the CSS class, defaults to ‘slideshowlite’

Usage

$(document).ready(function(){
	// with default options
	$("#slideshow").slideshow();

	// with custom options
	$("#slideshow2").slideshow({
		pauseSeconds: 4,
		height: 200
	});
});

Please checkout the demo for the HTML required.

Demo

Click here for a simple demo.

Download / Source Code

Changelog

v0.5.3 [2009-09-24]

• Added ‘fadeSpeed’ for setting the transition speed.

v0.5.2 [2009-09-06]

• Repackaged to remove an unnecessary .htaccess file.

v0.5.1 [2009-08-30]

• Fixed some typo.

v0.5 [2009-08-29]

• Major rewrite: slides can now be clicked freely (as opposed to waiting for one to finish showing before it can be clicked again).
• Added automatic photo caption.

v0.4 [2009-08-05]

• Code clean up.
• Added transparency effects to the navigation, to indicate when it is clickable.
• Added inline configuration documentation.

v0.3 [2009-08-04]

• Smoother animation.

v0.2 [2009-08-04]

• Fixed a navigation bug where the clicks no longer work after clicking on the current slideshow.

v0.1 [2009-08-04]

• Initial release.

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A bug caused by ‘fireDelay‘ is fixed.

Please head over to the release post or the jQuery plugin site for the download link.

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I’ve come across two issues on Internet Explorer 7 while developing a website containing some slideDown() effects, and found some quick fixes for them. :)

Issue 1: slideDown() does not actually slide, the target HTML element appears the same way as show().

After messing around with the JavaScript and HTML, I’ve finally nailed down the issue. It occurs when there are absolutely positioned elements in the target HTML.

Typically when we have absolutely positioned elements, we would want to have a relatively positioned wrapper element to control the position of the elements on the page. It makes perfect sense to simply trigger the slideDown() effect on the wrapper.

The HTML schema would look something like this:

Wrapper A (the element that contains Wrapper B, it makes an AJAX call to retrieve Wrapper B)
…. Wrapper B (the relatively positioned target element that is assigned to the slideDown() event)
…. …. Element C (absolutely positioned)

Both Firefox and Safari don’t have any problems with that, but Internet Explorer does. On IE 7 (I haven’t tested IE 6), the targeted HTML (Wrapper B) will simply appear without the sliding effect, resulting the same effect as calling show().

The fix is simple, make the parent element (Wrapper A) relatively positioned too.

Issue 2: slideDown() animates, then the element vanishes immediately afterwards.

The problematic JavaScript looks something like this:

var data = 'Some HTML retrieved from an AJAX call.';
$("div#wrapper_b").hide().html(data).slideDown();

The fix is quick and simple:

var data = 'Some HTML retrieved from an AJAX call.';
$("div#wrapper_b").hide().html(data).slideDown().show(function(){
	$(this).html(data).show();
});

Of course, depending on the HTML markup, your mileage may vary.

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If you don’t already know, endless scroll (or infinite scrolling) is a popular technique among web 2.0 sites such as Google Reader and Live Image Search, where instead of paging through items using the traditional pagination technique, the page just keeps loading with new items attached to the end.

I have developed a jQuery plugin to easily achieve this.

Requirement: jQuery 1.2+

The plugin is tested with jQuery 1.2.6, 1.3 and 1.4.

There are a few options to customise the behaviour of this plugin:

• bottomPixels (integer) – the number of pixels from the bottom of the page that triggers the event
• fireOnce (boolean) – only fire once until the execution of the current event is completed
• fireDelay (integer) – delay the subsequent firing, in milliseconds. 0 or false to disable delay.
• loader (string) – HTML loader
• data (string) – plain HTML data
• insertAfter (string) – jQuery selector syntax: where to put the loader as well as the plain HTML data
• callback (function) – callback function, accepets one argument: fire sequence (the number of times the event triggered during the current page session)
• resetCounter (function) – resets the fire sequence counter if the function returns true, this function could also perform hook actions since it is applied at the start of the event

In a typical scenario, you won’t be using the ‘data’ option, but rather the ‘callback’ option. You may use it to trigger an AJAX call and updates/inserts your page content.

Usage

// using default options
$(document).endlessScroll();
// using some custom options
$(document).endlessScroll({
	fireOnce: false,
	fireDelay: false,
	loader: "<div class="loading"><div>",
	callback: function(p){
		alert("test");
	}
});

Demo

Click here for a simple demo.

Download / Source Code

Changelog

v1.4.1 [2010-06-18]

• Fixed a bug where the callback fires when the inner wrap hasn’t been created.

v1.4 [2010-06-18]

• Endless Scroll now works with any elements, not just $(document)!

v1.3 [2009-04-20]

• Fixed a bug caused by ‘fireDelay‘.

v1.2 [2009-01-16]

• Added ‘resetCounter‘ option.

v1.1 [2009-01-15]

• Added ‘fireDelay‘ option.

v1.0 [2009-01-15]

• Initial release.

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We’ve been working on a video site recently that uses the fantastic JW Player to play the .flv flash files. For some reason, there were some issues with using a tabbed interface we’d made in conjunction with the JW Player.

After changing from a tab with a text page back to the video page, the following error was coming up:

Error: $("#player1")[0].sendEvent is not a function

The code causing this error was a little routine to load a different video into the player when someone clicks on a different tab:

$('#player1')[0].sendEvent('LOAD',obj);

After a whole day of trial and error and putting alerts all over my JS code, I finally worked out what the hell was going on.

Even though my JS code was waiting until the document had been loaded (through jQuery’s $(document).ready(function() { blah..blah), the JW Player wasn’t loading in that time. It turns out even though our tabbed pages were powered by simple show/hide CSS, going from the video tab to a non-video tab and back made the JW Player have to load again.

The sendEvent is not a function error was simply because the JW Player hadn’t loaded yet, so the player1 object didn’t exist yet!

The solution? A simple delay:

setTimeout(function() { $('#player1')[0].sendEvent('LOAD',obj); }, 200);

Now this is not a pretty solution at all. Maybe 200 ms is enough time for the player to load on my computer, but what about on another set up? Newer versions of the JW Player automatically call a particular function when it finishes loading (playerReady()), but I wasn’t able to find a quick and easy way to check the player was loaded.

If anyone knows how to get playerReady() working nicely with jQuery’s $(document).ready() I’d love to hear about it. From the comments on the JW Player site, it seems the playerReady() function is a little flakey in any case. But is a setTimeout any better? Hmm…

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<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function(){
        var so = new SWFObject("movie.swf", "mymovie", "400", "100%", "8", "#336699");
        so.addParam("quality", "low");
        so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
        so.addParam("salign", "t");
        so.write("flashcontent");
    });
</script>

The only downside to this is that if you have some alternate HTML to show when Flash isn’t present, this text will be shown until the document is fully loaded and the player(s) start to render (even if the user does in fact have Flash installed).

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It took a little while but in the end I realised what was going on – json_encode wasn’t working. The server was running PHP 5.1.6 and json_encode only became “standard” with PHP 5.2.0 onward.

I needed a solution fast. No time to recompile a newer version of PHP, add libraries or anything fancy like that. I just needed the function json_encode to work right now. Thankfully, the solution was as easy as adding replacement a function a user kindly submitted from the PHP site itself:

http://au.php.net/manual/en/function.json-encode.php#82904

I blindly assumed PHP 5 was PHP 5. I wasn’t using any extremely fancy commands or anything, but I still came unstuck. So the moral of today is check your server specification right down to every last decimal point! ;)

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