Infopanel - block or module?

[espsjurs]

Anyone know about a module or block that will show news or content pages continuously? Like wait for 15 sec and show the next?

[layingback]

The following seems to work for a module:

Add at end of the module's display code for the page:

Code::

url_refresh(getlink(),10);

where 10 is number of seconds to display before update.

Details here.

If you created the content specifically for this purpose, and thus could ensure no gaps in the record index, then you could simply increment your way through the records with a suitable getlink call, and a loop back to 1 when limit is reached.

A reasonably simple add to an existing News, Content, Pro_News, etc, display item page. Indeed I believe you could do it all in template for Pro_News.

The Featured Content Slider module by grenday2k would do what you want, plus give you smoother blended changes, but you would have to enter all the data. Or there is a FCS template for Pro_News which will take any Pro_News articles, including images, and display as an FCS, no changes other than selecting the FCS template. (Example on my Home page.)

[espsjurs]

Thanks layingback, I am getting closer..

[DJ Maze]

Better to write it in JavaScript using setInterval

[layingback]

Indeed the FCS approach does use JavaScript setInterval (ie. it's 'pull' not 'push').

There is an (untested!) option in Pro_News to get the content from a saved html file using Ajax. It came as part of the FCS module from DynamicDrive. You would have to create the source html file - somehow. Might be of some use? Pro_News can display an article in a Center Block, but the non-Ajax version is limited to 10 records I believe, as its intended purpose was a rotating banner type display.

(presumably the same would work with greenday2k's FCS module)

[layingback]

Been thinking some more on this ...

First, I need to note that Pro_News supports a "Featured Content Slider" (FCS) function - by trivially changing the template - as well as a Center Up Block. But it does not - currently - support an FCS Center Block. Probably not impossible, however I'd just never thought of it.

You don't give details of the problem you are trying to address with this, but I've been pondering how you might display a large (> 10) number of ever changing/incrementing articles. Pro_News will display a page's worth of articles (10, or however many articles per page you've set), in an FCS display. You could probably handle 20 or so this way, but beyond that you may be assuming a lot about how much data the user's browser can cache.

I've done a quick test, and if you set a Pro_News Section with, say, 100 articles to display as FCS then the first 10 are displayed in FCS plus a normal DF pagination block below. Clicking on Next will display the next 10 articles in the FCS, and so forth.

So I'm thinking an additional setInterval script to simulate clicking the Next button after 10 articles have displayed in the FCS should move you on through the entire Section. This ought to be possible from inside the template, ie. without changing Pro_News code.

Obviously this will cause a page refresh which may or may not present a problem, but to employ the embedded Ajax method probably requires a Pro_News code change. Unless it is possible to dump the required part of a template out to a file from within the template - but I can't think how to do accomplish that ...

( I'm still learning how powerful the DF template system is - I've just implemented a fund raising style donation thermometer entirely in the template alone which is quite amazing - but there are limits to everything! )