Legacy vBSlider v3.0 Beta 2 Feedback Thread

[bszopi]

Ozzy47, GoodApples, glagrow, Webbstre, CoZmicShReddeR, San, IcEWoLF, Trekkan, steris56

Ok guys, I just wanted to start this thread to see how testing is going on v3, get some feedback from you guys, and also give you an update on what I am currently working on for Beta 3. First off, I want to thank Fillip H. for getting the instances up and running, as I think that is an awesome addition to this, and will make it much more versatile for everyone.

Alright, now that I'm not traveling back and forth to my old house trying to get it ready to sell, I have finally had some time to work on some additional features and bug fixes for the product. Items that are currently complete are:

• Custom VBSLIDER BBCode: This acts just like the IMG BBCode, but will allow you to decide which image gets shown in the slider. I need to look into making this work for attachments as well...
• Random Left/Right ONLY for content area: This is just another option for where the content displays, but takes out the TOP option in the randomize.
• Soft-deleted Blogs still display: Fixed
• Retrieve External Images: Slider will now download any external image and save it to a directory. This will assist in making sure there are no issues with the slider if the external site goes down, image removed, etc.
  • Looking to possibly resize the images as well, if they are really big
  • Looking into having a cron job run every 24hrs to delete all files in the directory so that we aren't storing a huge amount of files.

Ok, that's what is currently working. Here are a few items I'm going to work on getting into the product as well before the Open Beta starts.

• Option to select Newest, Oldest, Most Read or Most Popular content types (currently just Newest)
• CMS Category selection, which will allow you to enter a single Category from the CMS and pull Articles from that Category. This will be in addition to Sections. Therefore if you have a News category, and you have News items in various sections, it will only display articles in the News Category but from all the sections.

There are a couple other bugs I need to weed out, and a couple more feature requests from vb.org, but not sure if they will make it in right away or not. So anyway, that is where I currently stand, so I'd love to hear feedback from all of the closed-beta testers. Thanks!

 

[bszopi]

Are you looking at the CMS one when you are doing the testing? Remember the CMS is cached, so unless you are clearing the cache after every change, you will see a delay.

The CSS for the CMS also isn't complete right now, but the forum background should work. If not, I'll look into it tonight and see what the deal is.

Brad via Tapatalk

 

[Freekoid]

Will we be able to re=position the forwards/backwards/pause buttons?

 

[bszopi]

They are part of the CSS, although I don't know how easy it would be to make it an option. You may have to get into the CSS yourself to position them.

With that said, the reason I have them where they currently are is due to where the content areas are. Default, the forward and back buttons are on the side, but that interfered with the content, so I shifted them. Because it is a bordered widget, they are confined to within that space unfortunately.

Where did you have in mind to place them?

Brad via Tapatalk

 

[bszopi]

I'd suggest not making the color a stylevar and also possibly putting the type of display for the timer in the instances.

I say this, because as you can have instances now, there might be people with different styles in different areas that would say want a red bar in one, a green in another. Won't affect me much, but something to consider. =)

Type of display is in the instance already. There are only 4 items that I need to add, and they will most likely just be added in the instances to make it easier: loader color, loader bkgnd color, and navigation icon color (33 pre-defined colors in a sprite), nav bkgnd color. I'm also re-arranging the options in the instance so that all of the loader bits are together, navigation is together, etc.

 

[Steris56]

They are part of the CSS, although I don't know how easy it would be to make it an option. You may have to get into the CSS yourself to position them.

With that said, the reason I have them where they currently are is due to where the content areas are. Default, the forward and back buttons are on the side, but that interfered with the content, so I shifted them. Because it is a bordered widget, they are confined to within that space unfortunately.

Where did you have in mind to place them?




Brad via Tapatalk

is it entirely possible to place them under the selector circles rather then in the image????

 

[bszopi]

is it entirely possible to place them under the selector circles rather then in the image????

What might be a good idea would be to place them where the "Under Slider" copyright is now, and just get rid of that completely. That may even solve the issue I'm having now with being able to change the background color for the nav buttons, as I haven't figured out a way to get it integrated with the CSS (the loader colors are part of the script call, so I can get those in easily). If that sounds like a good option to people, I will mess around with it and provide a screen shot of what it would look like.

 

[GoodApples]

Although I haven't actually tried it, with the ability to do instances, I bet you could do an html widget and place the code for the instance inside there and achieve what you are saying. By messing with the Stylevars, and/or templates, you can make it borderless as well and make it look completely integrated. This of course is just an assumption.
Yes.

I gave it a try and placed

{vb:raw show.vbslider_instance1}

in a html widget. It didn't work for me...just displayed the code in text. It would be a big plus for the vbSlider if it had an option for a side widget. (left & right options)

 

[bszopi]

I'll try it tonight and see if I can make it work.

Brad via Tapatalk

 

[bszopi]

Got a very basic version of what you are wanting done with just a little work. See screen shots below.

 

[GoodApples]

I quickly gave the above a try but I didn't get it to work.
I am most like missing something and on that note heading off to sleep.

I hope we see it as a default option.

 

[Webbstre]

I got it installed, but haven't tested it yet. I kind of got side tracked by something that I totally signed an NDA for I'll try to get some testing in this weekend, and give feedback.

 

[Ozzy47]

lol at NDA, hmmm I wonder what that could be???

 

[Steris56]

as was said in earlier posts we need to get rid of that green circle that is a tad bit destracting to my member base i have been getting quite a few complaints on it .... perhaps we can think of something else

 

[bszopi]

To get rid of the green circle, in the instance options either change the loader to BAR or NONE and it will go away.

Brad via Tapatalk

 

[Freekoid]

Brad how does the pre-loader work? Is it calling to each image individually before each slide is about to show or does it set itself up with all slides first?

I only ask as it lags occasionally when an 'image' call happens on a slide, text and pre-backgrounds work at good speeds.

And should we low grade images from say .png to maybe .jpeg or even .bmp to speed things up?

 

[Ozzy47]

Blogs should only show in the slider if they are approved, I just unapproved some blogs here on DBT and they still show in the slider, and if a member clicks on Read More they of course get the "Invalid Blog specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator"

 

[bszopi]

Brad how does the pre-loader work? Is it calling to each image individually before each slide is about to show or does it set itself up with all slides first?

I only ask as it lags occasionally when an 'image' call happens on a slide, text and pre-backgrounds work at good speeds.

And should we low grade images from say .png to maybe .jpeg or even .bmp to speed things up?

The way I understand it is that it loads the image when it goes to get displayed. Therefore, if you have a large image from a remote server, it may lag slightly. But, in the next Beta, this should be resolved as remote images are being retrieved and saved locally, so there shouldn't really be any lag. We'll have to see.

Brad via Tapatalk

 

[bszopi]

Blogs should only show in the slider if they are approved, I just unapproved some blogs here on DBT and they still show in the slider, and if a member clicks on Read More they of course get the "Invalid Blog specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator"

This has been corrected in the next Beta, which I hope to get out this week. Was making decent progress on it recently until this last week. Should have time to work on it tonight, though, and get it ready to be released.

Brad via Tapatalk

 

[Steris56]

ok i ran into issue tonight perhaps you can help remedy i put this on main site quite recently i had it on test site well anyway i have quite a few pro mods and lite ones after installing this i went from .14 percent on server load to 1.90 very drastic for this i went to crawl on site i had no choice but to disable this to bring my load under normal parameters..

my question is why is this so server intensive and how do i fix it

 

[bszopi]

Do you only have a single instance of it running? How many content items are you loading into the slider? Honestly, I don't think it should be any more server intensive than version 2. Perhaps Fillip H. has some insight into it.