Home Page Products Carousel [Support Thread]

This is the official support thread for the ZX Home Page Products Carousel plugin.

For those who want to download it before it is approved and available in the Plugins section, you can find it here.

The official plugin download is here

The plugin allows you to add a rotating slider to your home page and automatically display your latest products, specials, featured, bestsellers or simply a custom list of products.

Attachment 17903


Any questions you may have, please ask here and I'll do my best to reply. No guarantees, but I'll do my best.

This is brilliant, thank you very much!

Thanks for the feedback - glad to hear you like it!

The plugin has been approved and can be found here.

Suggestions and ideas for improvement are always welcome.

Hello Leonard,

I hope you and yours are safe and well. Gotta say that it was difficult to find this thread - your plugin doesn't show up in plugins search for carousel or even zx products carousel ?? I had to go to my hard drive downloaded copy to find the ink in the readme :)

Question - can the slider be used for crawler readable text? - the idea was to use news articles (for my products) that I use lat9 's News Box Manager for posting updates. The news box is on the home page and the crawlers are responding to the keywords in the text so rather than have myriads of news items in a long news box I wondered if rotating the articles/posts via your slider would be helpful. I suppose it might act like an rss feed or similar??

just wondering.

cheers, Mike

see news box on my site here www.dazzlerscliponearrings.com.au

Hey Mike!

Yeah, the plugin doesn't show up in search - I have no idea why... Maybe PM Scott about it?

I'm pretty sure the slider could be used to rotate contents from the News Box Manager, but I'm not familiar with that plugin. It's basically just a matter of adding the correct SQL query to this plugin. I'm currently away, but will see if I can find some time tomorrow and come up with a solution. I'll post the results here.

I'm gonna try it, any words from the wise?
zc157b
posinstorepayment
coinpayments
posinstore
fedexwebservices
ups
No additional modules

Looking specifically at the optional database patch, not sure what it's going to do and what's the line on the deletes might do.

I don't see why it wouldn't work with 1.5.7b, other than maybe requiring a careful merge of tpl_index_categories.php and tpl_index_default.php

As for the optional SQL query - it's optional. Copy/paste from the docs:
In case this automated installation fails for whatever reason, you can run the SQL patch manually.
So, unless for some reason the automated installer fails, there's no need to use the patch. As for the deletes - it would remove any previous database entries from this plugin, and then insert it again. Basically a (dirty) way of reinstalling - it doesn't check for existing entries and updates if necessary, but instead wipes any existing entries and inserts it back. Kinda like a factory reset...

Well, it works pretty good and looks nice on the home page, but it seems to take the center column space on other pages without displaying the carousel. I.E.- when I select a category from the top bar , the center column is filled with white space and the sub-categories (cattopgroup/categorylistboxcontents)are way down at the bottom, I can still select other categories from the top bar. When a category is selected from the sidebox category, I get the white space and the subs on the bottom, but also I am unable to select any different category from the sidebox list. I also have the next/back chevrons of owl_nav_disabled right on top of the sub-category display at the bottom. I've analyzed the tpl_index_default, tpl_index_categories and the tpl_index_slider and the code looks fine as far as I can tell. I know I'm missing something but can't quite pinpoint what. Any ideas?

Well, that's one interesting oversight with the plugin. You should edit the tpl_index_slider.php file and change

Code:

---

if(ZX_CAROUSEL_STATUS == 'true') {

---

to

Code:

---

if(ZX_CAROUSEL_STATUS == 'true' && $this_is_home_page) {

---

That's it. Sorry about that, I'm surprised this hasn't been reported by now, but then again, if the plugin doesn't show up in search...