Content Slideshow Widget

What is it?

The Slideshow widget is a great way to highlight recent information from blogs, calendars, or forums, presenting key information such as title, summary, shortened contents, and a link to the source to find out more. Blog articles, calendar events, and forum discussions are presented sequentially for a set amount of time with more recent activity appearing earlier in the slideshow. The displayed content can be accessed directly by selecting the title, or by selecting the Read More button (if it is being used).

Multiple Slideshow widgets can be used on a single page or space, each displaying content from different sources in your workplace. For instance, you may have a Slideshow widget displaying recent entries from your CEO’s blog, and another Slideshow widget displaying current discussions in your workplace’s forum. A single Slideshow widget cannot itself collect and display information from multiple sources.

The slideshow widget was replaced on May 10, 2017. If you are editing a Slideshow widget that was created before that date, you will need to reference our Legacy Slideshow Widget Documentation

Use Cases

Display corporate news

Use the Slideshow widget with a blog to feature corporate news on your homepage. Placing this widget at the top of the page will create a visually appealing newscast of the latest, and greatest on the corporate news front. Remember to incorporate images when you can to draw more attention to the posts. Set no more than the last five posts to keep content fresh.

Images

If you want to use the Slideshow widget to display a variety of images, you can set a Blog channel and populate it with images only. From there you can control what is seen by editing the Layout portion of the widget. You can add this to a social zone in your workplace to show off special events that have taken place within the organization.

Features and functionality

To edit the functionality of the Slideshow widget you must first find and select the Action Button on your page, then select Edit from the provided menu. Locate your Slideshow widget and select Edit.

Options

Title: This name is displayed above the content of the slideshow. It can be left blank or contain up to 140 characters.
Description: This text is displayed below the title and above the content of the slideshow. There is no limit to the amount of text that can be placed here.
Channel type: This option lets you choose the type of channel that you would like to display content from. These options include Blog, Forum, and Calendar channels. The Channel type that you select will determine what channels you will be able to select in the following channel options. For example, selecting Blog as the channel type will result in only Blog channels being displayed and selectable from the channel options.
Channel: Selecting the text box will produce a dropdown menu with the channels that content can be displayed from. Only channels that match the type selected in the channel type are shown. Next to each channel’s name will also be a number indicating the amount of content present in that channel.

Layout

Slides: Determines how many slides the slideshow will cycle through. This value ranges from 1 to 20 and the default value is 5. These slides are always ordered from most recent to least recent when displaying content from the connected channel. Pinning a blog article will not affect the ordering of slideshow. If using a slideshow to display forum posts, be aware that replies to a forum discussion will make it more recent, changing the order of the slideshow presentation. A slideshow displaying calendar events will only show upcoming events up to 6 months in the future. The slideshow will cycle back to the first slide after having displayed the last slide.
Time: This feature allows you to determine how long each individual slide will stay on the screen before cycling. The value ranges from 3 to 20 seconds with a default value of 10 seconds.
Transition: The Fade option causes an old slide to fade out while the next slide in the cycle fades in. The Slide option causes slides to move from left to right.
Image:The Image option allows you to choose where images will appear in the widget. The image that is displayed is always the first that appears in the post being displayed.
- Above Content: This option will show the image above your post title and body, filling the full width of the frame and cropping height to 200 pixels, as necessary.
- Beside Content: This option will show the image beside your post title and body. On mobile devices and reduced screen widths, the image will be repositioned to display above the text. Both the image and text will still take up the assigned height (ex. if you set the height to 350px, the height will still be 350px but now be split between the height and text). Because of this, the display space available to the image may be smaller which will cause the image to be cropped to the center of the display space. This cropping may result in the top and bottom of the image being cutoff.
- Behind Content: This option shows the text overlayed on top of your image. The image will be sized to fit the width of to widget and cropped to fit the height. That height can vary depending on the amount of summary and body being shown. This is the default setting.
- No Image: This option will not show any image and displays only text.
Overlay: The overlay option is only available for the Behind Content image option. It applies a translucent cover over your images in the slideshow to make your text more readable. You have the options of a "Fixed Overlay”, where you pick the color of the cover or Auto Overlay which will use the dominant color of the current image as the overlay color.
- Example with Auto Overlay applied:
- Example without an overlay:
Navigation: Add an indicator to your slideshow to convey where people are in the slideshow and help them transition between slides. Dots displays a series of dots for each slide that is in the slideshow. The dot is filled in to indicate what slide the show is currently on. Clicking on a dot will bring you to the corresponding slide in the slideshow. The Arrows option shows small arrow icons at either slide of the widget allowing users to advance slides.
Content: The Content section of the layout controls dictates how much text from your posts appear in the widget.
- Title: Determines the maximum length of the title the widget will display before truncating it. The default setting is to show the full title, but you can also select anywhere from 0 to 45 characters at five-character intervals.
- Summary: Determines how much of the content’s summary information is displayed. Forums do not have summaries, however, blogs and calendar events do. Displaying short summaries on your slideshow can be a good way to attract people’s interest in your content. The default value displays the first 175 characters. You can select values between 0 and 325 in 25 character intervals. You can also choose to show the full summary.
- Body: Determines how much of the content's body information will be displayed. Images in the body will be not be displayed, other than the first which is used in the slideshow. The default setting shows 350 characters. You can use the slider to select 0 to 650 characters in 50 character intervals. You can also show the full body text.
- Read More: Adds a selectable button to the slideshow that will bring people to the source of the slideshows currently displayed content. Off will remove the read more button, however selecting the article title will still allow your members to navigate to the full article. The Contextual option will only cause the Read More button to be displayed if there is more content to be displayed in the source. Always On will show the Read More link to appear, even if all of the text of the post is displayed in the widget.
Statistics: There are three checkboxes available for toggling the visibility of ratings, comments, and views on the post. Note that ratings will only be displayed if the content has received a rating. If comments are being displayed in your slideshow, people can select the comments value shown on the slideshow to bring them to the source content.