AnythingSlider for Movable Type

Before the break for the summer semester, I sat down with Sean Shapiro and Heather Linder, or Web Editor and Editor-in-Chief, respectively, and we took a look at what they wanted to see on bgnews.com for the fall.  Top of that list was an image-based carousel.

Feature-wise, the one we were currently using was not cutting the mustard. I took a good hard look at Agile Carousel, and even started writing Movable Type code to work with it. But its not exactly easy to use. Then I ran into AnythingSlider by Chris Coyier and eventually an even better fork of it by Dean Sofer on GitHub. That is the history lesson, now lets move on to AnythingSlider for Movable Type. AnythingSlider for Movable Type consists of two plugins, one for changing all the settings of the carousel itself, and one for managing each slide. I am currently using this plugin on a few client web sites, bgnews.com being one of them, and am continuing to develop it - there are more options I want to expose in a Movable Type interface.

The download also comes with Mark Carey's TemplateInstaller, as I have created a set of templates, modules and widgets for AnythingSlider. Mark was nice enough to allow me to package his plugin in with mine.

AnythingSlider for Movable Type was written in Config Assistant for a couple reasons. Config Assistant makes development and upkeep a snap, and allows virtually anyone to make modifications to my AnythingSlider plugin. Say you want to use Pages instead of Entries in your carousel. This is a trivial change in the YAML code of the AnythingSlider plugin, and nothing else needs to be modified.

See the README for installing, including prerequisites. You will likely need to modify the CSS and the Template Modules to fit the size and style of your carousel. Currently there is an image-based slider, and an article-based slider (like on bgnews.com) installed with the Template Modules.

There is more to come soon, just watch GitHub for updates.