I bought these scrollers today just for the ability to select the categories that are displayed.

I was a bit surprised that I had to create a second menu with a Virtuemart entry in it as the scroller module couldn't see the existing Virtuemart menu entry. The documentation that I saw didnt really explain this at all but no real problem there though.

I have found the css entries to alter the module background colour and remove the border so the module is starting to fit into our style.

But I do have a much bigger problem.

Having installed the modules it's starting to look as though I have to specify the exact image sizes for the scroller to work properly. The trouble is that all the product images and thumbnails are different sizes and currently they seem to be displayed squashed or stretched if they dont happen to be the same size as the specified size.

Is there any way around this? No other scroller I tried had this requirement and it never occurred to me that this one would. Other scrollers always displayed the images as they found them, just resizing to fit and maintaining proportions.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

vagabond.celeonet.fr/cipango/

Hello Maz -

We can publish the line of code for you where you would disable the sizing of the images. The reason we make the images the same size is to maintain a smooth line with the price and other attributes and keep everything displayed nicely.

Let me put this into an example. You have one image that is 100pxs tall, another that is 200pxs tall. You have both Add-to-cart and the price.

How tall does the module have to be? Well, it will have to be at least 250px tall to accommodate the biggest image. The smaller image and its information will be swallowed in a sea of white space. Now, if you are scrolling multiple images, then suppose all the other images in the set are small. Then all of them look like there is a ton of whitespace for no reason, as the big image has scrolled off.

I can tell you how to disable this feature and then let the chips fall where they may on the scroller, but even if you are scrolling just images and no data, I just don't think the results will be aesthetically pleasing.

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, I would like to know where to disable the feature as sadly the scroller is unusable for us as it stands. You probably noticed on our site that (at the moment) the owner just wants to display one item at a time. If we have any text at all it will just be the short description. He wants us to have three such scrollers, one under the other, for the three different main categories of product. This is why we turned to your module.

I suppose I could be looking more at a slideshow module, but I know that somewhere down the line the owner may want to move back to a multiple item display. Your scroller seemed like a good and flexible compromise.

The various other (free) scrollers that I tried all handled different image sizes without any problem but unfortunately the only one that could deal with selecting images from particular categories also included some sort of image resizing that made the images very blurry. The other scrollers (including the standard Virtuemart scroller) seemed to display the images without any resizing at all, and the result was perfect (except of course for the inability to select from particular categories). All the images displayed were centered horizontally and vertically, and that's all we need. We don't care if the description text moves up and down a little for each image, though I suppose it might also be acceptable for the text and images to be aligned to the bottom of the module box.

We aren't bothered about the thumbnail images being different sizes, just as long as they all fit in the module box.

Would there be any way to use just the category selection feature from your scroller with the regular Virtuemart scroller? We have 1500 products on this site and I dont really fancy resizing all the thumbnails to a standard size, especially as they dont even have the same format and so they would need a white canvas adjustment as well as a resize. I suppose I could automate the task in Photoshop but even so its a bit of a nuisance. Also I'm not sure I can rely on whoever will create future new products to size the images correctly. You can't get the staff, you know.

Thanks again for your input.

Change the line that reads (around line 396):
return '<a href="' + item.lnk + '"><img src="' + item.url + '" width="<?php echo $imgWidth; ?>" height="<?php echo $imgHeight; ?>" alt="' + item.title + '" /><center>' + item.title + '</center></a>';

TO:
return '<a href="' + item.lnk + '"><img src="' + item.url + '" alt="' + item.title + '" /><center>' + item.title + '</center></a>';

Change the line that reads (around line 503):
echo '<li><a href="'.$sefProductLink.'" ><img src="'.URL.'components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/'.$showProductImageArray[$i].'" width="'.$imgWidth.'" height="'.$imgHeight.'" alt="'.$showProductNameArray[$i].'" /><center>'.$productDescription.'</center></a></li>';

TO:
echo '<li><a href="'.$sefProductLink.'" ><img src="'.URL.'components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/'.$showProductImageArray[$i].'" alt="'.$showProductNameArray[$i].'" /><center>'.$productDescription.'</center></a></li>';

This will stop resizing the images.

Jerry

Thanks. That seems to have done the trick. Some of the thumbnails are rather long and thin (bracelets) so we may end up redoing those anyway.

I also seem to have a problem with a grey dot appearing just to the top left of the thumbnail image in the scroller. I suppose that this is some inherited css from the JA Purity II template?

Great.

Yes, JA is bad about specifying in their CSS an image marker for the unordered lists. Use Firebug to track it down and remove it from the CSS. That will mean that the browser default will be used, and our CSS (which is being overridden at the moment by JA) will suppress the default.