Billboards

Billboards are the rotating slides a hub shows on its front page. Each slide carries a background image, a heading, a block of text, and an optional "learn more" link. Slides belong to a collection, and the mod_billboards module displays one collection as a carousel. Go to Components → Billboards.

Whether your hub needs it

A billboard is the hub's shop window: the thing you want a visitor who has never been here to see in the first three seconds. Most hubs run three or four slides and change one of them a few times a year — a new tool, a paper, a workshop with places left.

The typical case: your annual user meeting opens for registration and you want it on the front page for six weeks. That is one billboard, published now and unpublished when registration closes.

This is a small component and there is not much to it. What makes it awkward is that it does nothing on its own: a published billboard appears nowhere until somebody places the mod_billboards module on a template position. If you have made a slide and cannot find it on the site, go straight to Displaying a carousel.

What it is not: it is not the front page. The hub's front page is a menu item and its layout comes from the template; billboards fill one band of it. And it is not the media manager — the image lives on the billboard, not in a library, and is deleted when you replace it.

The component has two screens, reached from the submenu:

• Billboards — the slides.
• Collections — the named groups a module points at.

Collections

A collection is a name and nothing else. It exists so that a hub can run more than one carousel — a front-page set and a landing-page set, say — and point each module instance at a different one.

Press New on the Collections screen, fill in Collection Name, and Save & Close. The list shows each collection's ID and name, and the toolbar carries New, Edit, and Delete.

Every billboard needs a collection. If you save a billboard without picking one, the component creates a collection called Default Collection and puts the slide in it.

Creating a billboard

1. Go to Components → Billboards and press New.
2. Fill in the fields below.
3. Press Save & Close.

The edit form has three fieldsets.

Content

Field	Notes
Name	Required. What the slide is called in the list
Collection	The collection this slide belongs to
Ordering	Position within the collection. On a new billboard this reads New Items Last; it becomes a drop-down once the slide is saved
Header	The heading drawn over the image
Background image	A file picker. See below
Text	The body text, edited in the rich-text editor

Learn More Link

Field	Notes
Learn more text	The link's label. Leave empty for no link
Learn more target	Where the link goes
Learn more class	An extra CSS class for the link
Learn more location	Top left, Top right, Bottom left, Bottom right, or Relative

Styling

Field	Notes
Alias	The slide's HTML id. The module writes the slide's CSS against it, so give each billboard a distinct alias
Text padding	A CSS padding value applied to the slide's text
CSS	Free-form CSS added to the page for this slide

Adding a background image

The Background image field is an ordinary file input on the edit form. There is no media browser and no separate upload step.

1. Open the billboard you want to edit.
2. Press the button beside Background image and choose a file from your computer.
3. Press Save or Save & Close.

The file is scanned for viruses and moved into the directory named by the component's Image Location option, which defaults to /site/media/images/billboards/. See the generated parameter list. Uploading a new image deletes the one it replaces.

Once a billboard has an image, the edit form shows it under Current Image, scaled to 500 pixels wide.

The billboard list

The list shows each slide's ID, name, collection, ordering, and published state. Click a name to edit it. Click the icon in the Published column to toggle the slide on or off. Reorder slides by typing new numbers in the Ordering column and pressing the column's sort arrows.

The toolbar carries Publish, Unpublish, New, Edit, Delete, and — for users with core.admin — Options.

Only published billboards appear in a carousel.

Unpublishing is how you retire the user-meeting slide when registration closes: the slide drops out of the carousel at once and everything about it survives, so next year you edit the dates and publish it again. Delete takes the record and its uploaded image with it. Given that a billboard is a few sentences and a picture, there is rarely a reason to delete rather than unpublish.

A new billboard is created unpublished — the edit form has no published field at all, so the only way to put a slide on the front page is the Published toggle in the list. That is the right way round: write and save the slide, come back to the list, and toggle it on when you are satisfied. There is no preview, so the front page itself is the first place you see the slide rendered.

Displaying a carousel

Slides are not shown by the component. They are shown by the mod_billboards module, which you publish to a template position from Extensions → Module Manager. Its options are:

Option	Default	Notes
Billboard Collection	collection 1	Which collection to display
Slide Transition Style	Scroll Horizontal	Scroll Horizontal, Scroll Vertical, Fade, Shuffle, Zoom, or Turn left
Random	No	Show the slides in random order
Slide Time	5	Seconds each slide stays on screen
Transition Speed	1	Seconds a transition takes
Display Pager	Yes	Show the dots that let a visitor jump between slides

Several instances of the module can run at once, each on its own collection and its own timing.

Note the Billboard Collection default: collection 1. On a hub that has never created a collection by hand, the first slide you save creates Default Collection, which is usually ID 1, and the module finds it. On a hub where somebody has since deleted or renumbered collections, a freshly placed module points at a collection that may not exist and shows nothing. If the carousel is empty, check the module's collection against the Collections screen before you look anywhere else.

Slide Time defaults to 5 seconds, which is too fast for a slide carrying a paragraph of text — a reader who has to finish a sentence will not. If your slides have more than a headline on them, 8 to 10 is kinder. This is a module setting and changing it affects only that module instance, so it is safe to try on a live hub and change back.