Ryan Dohrn shows how to set up RokSprocket, Joomla's slideshow module. Upload images to 550 × 200 px, add articles to the Module Manager, customize titles and descriptions, then adjust layout options like animation type, delay timing, and image resizing to match your site's look.
Alright, today we're going to talk about how to use Rock Sprocket from Rocket Theme to drive these main page images on the website. Okay, and so you notice that you've got a description here, you've got a title, I'm sorry, here. Okay, and then you'll notice you can click through the pictures, the various pictures. Okay, and then when you actually click on Read More, it's going to actually go over to the article. Okay, different from the past, you actually have a main page picture that's actually different or can be different from the main page picture on the article itself. Okay, so what you're going to do is we're going to log into the Module Manager. You've got it here called Main Page Featured. Now you can have as many featured on the front as you want. You'll notice right now I have 2, and I'm going to show you how to add another. First step though, really truly, is you need to actually not be here. You need to actually be in the Media Manager. So, from your control panel, just go to the Media Manager. And what you're going to do is there's a folder here that's marked Featured. This folder right here marked Featured. And you're actually going to want to upload the photos that you have there. They need to be consistent. Right now, the photos being uploaded are 550 pixels wide by 200 tall. You can make them any size that you want. You just want them to be consistent, okay? So, you want to load those in the Media Manager first. Then we're going to go over here to the Module Manager. I know I'm going kind of fast, but you can always watch this again. Okay, so here we are, and what I want to do, I've got 2 articles there rotating now, alright, and so I'm going to want to add another, okay. So you'll notice right here I've got Ryan Test 2, Ryan Test 3. Let's go ahead and I'm going to click the Add button to add another. I'm going to select the article that I want to feature, and let's choose Ryan Test Article 1, okay, and there it's going to add it here. If I want to change the order of how these appear, I simply grab this over here on the right side and then move it to the top. Okay, now what do I want that title to be that appears on the main page? Let's just say we're going to do custom, it's the best way to do it, and let's just choose as an example, gardening tips from Ryan. Okay, now the description, I'm going to just turn that off. I don't want a description. The image, what I want is I want to choose the image from the media manager, and then I'm going to choose this little icon here to the right to choose it. I'm going to go to the media manager and click on the featured folder, and I'm going to choose this gardening picture that I've already pre-sized. Okay, now you can change where it links to, otherwise it's going to default link right to the article itself. Okay. So let's go ahead and go up here and let's choose Save. Okay, let's see, what does that mean? Okay, just resaved it again and it seems to be fine. So, all right, let's go over to the main page and let's refresh. Okay, remember sometimes you have to clear your cache. All right, so here's Gardening Tips from Ryan and then it's going to fade over then, it should automatically, to the Greatest Greens story. And then it's going to fade over then to Golf Fun. So you notice if you click on the article itself, it's actually going to go over to that Test 3 article. If I click the Home button— whoops, I don't want to click Home on that for right now. Let's go back. Alright, and let's go ahead and refresh the page. Let's start rotating again. So if I actually click on Gardening Tips from Ryan anywhere or on the Read More, Then it's going to take me over to that article that I chose, which was Ryan Test Article #1. Now keep in mind, there's a lot of different features like this Read More button. We can get rid of that. We can change the amount of time. So we go back over to the Module Manager, you notice there's all kinds of layout options, okay? So you can choose a display limit. I mean, you can choose the slideshow theme. You can— article titles, you can choose to show them or not. Animation, you can do a crossfade. You can do random, top to bottom. You can change the delay rate, you can automatically choose image resize, there's all kinds of options there as well. So, it's called Rock Sprocket, it's a little bit different than the one that— the Rocket— Rock Stories from the past, but I think it's really great and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. This is Ryan Dohrn over at BrainSwirl Media, more Joomla tips straight ahead.
