Trans Slide Show - Frequently Asked Questions
(www.flevooware.nl/dreamweaver)

 

This FAQ answers the following questions:

  1. What happens if the images are not the same height and width?
  2. How to use Trans Slide Show in a template based page?
  3. Do the images have to be preloaded for this to work correctly?
  4. My slideshow only shows the first 2 images. Why?

What happens if the images are not the same height and width?

Then all slide images will be forced to the same height/width as the base image (= the first slide image). And that's probably not what you would want to see in your slide show.    :-)

But you can always "simulate" this same size by placing smaller images on a transparent background that has the same size as the largest image to be used in the slide show (= adding dummy 'white space' around smaller images).
You would do this in some graphics program like Fireworks or Photoshop of course, so the resulting GIFs or JPGs are all the same size.

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I would like to run a slide show on a template based page, but I don't know how to incorporate Trans Slide Show on a template based page.

There are several ways to handle this:

** number 1 (the simple way) **

The Trans Slide Show extension needs you to apply 1 or 2 behaviors to the page:

  1. The 'Init' behavior which would usually be applied to the onLoad event of the BODY tag.
  2. Optionally, if not using the auto-play feature in the 'Init' behavior, the 'Play' behavior, which would be applied to images or links to control going to the next/previous slide.

However, instead of applying the 'Init' behavior to the onLoad event of the BODY tag, you can apply it e.g. to the onLoad event for some IMG tag on your page (and thus not to the BODY tag).
Do NOT apply the behavior to the base image of the slide show itself, because then the slideshow will only show 2 images and then stop playing. Apply the behavior to some other image on the page (eg. a shim).

** number 2 (this is the more generic solution) **

What I often do in this type of situation is add a standard function call to the BODY tag in the template and put extra behavior calls in that standard function on pages that need extra functionality.

In the head section of the template page I put an editable region which looks something like:

<!-- #BeginEditable "extraScripts" -->
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
<!--
function onLoadExtras() {
    return;
}
//-->
</script>
< !-- #EndEditable -->

And I make the BODY tag in the template look something like this:

<body onload="onLoadExtras();">

And then I add stuff to the onLoadExtras() function in the head where necessary. In this case that would be the 'Trans Slide Show - Init' behavior function call.

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Do the images have to be preloaded for this to work correctly?

No, the extension itself preloads the images. If the next slide image is not fully preloaded yet, then the current slide will just remain longer in view until the next one is loaded.

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My slideshow only shows the first 2 images. Why?

You've probably applied the slide show initialisation behavior to the onLoad event of the IMG tag that serves as the base image for the slide show.
But it should be applied to the onLoad event of the BODY tag.

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