Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By : Natalie Maclees
Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By: Natalie Maclees

Overview of this book

jQuery is awesome for designers ñ it builds easily on the CSS and HTML you already know and allows you to create impressive effects with just a few lines of code. However, without a background in programming, JavaScript ñ on which jQuery is built ñ can feel intimidating and impossible to grasp. This book will show you how simple it can be to learn the basics and then extend your capabilities by taking advantage of jQuery plugins.jQuery for Designers offers approachable lessons for designers with little or no background in JavaScript. The book begins by introducing the jQuery library and a small and simple introduction to JavaScript. Then you'll step through a few simple tasks to get your feet wet before diving into using plugins to quickly and simply add complex effects with just a few lines of code.You'll be surprised at how far you can get with JavaScript when you start with the power of the jQuery library and this book will show you how. We'll cover common interface widgets and effects such as tabbed interfaces, custom tooltips, and custom scrollbars. You'll learn how to create an animated navigation menu and how to add simple AJAX effects to enhance your site visitors' experience. Then we'll wrap up with interactive data grids which make sorting and searching data easy.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – creating a slideshow


Here's how we can turn our lightbox image gallery into a slideshow:

  1. Open scripts.js. We're going to add another key/value pair to our settings. To create a slideshow inside our Colorbox, set the slideshow key to true:

    $('a[rel="ireland"]').colorbox({
           transition: 'none',
           width:	'90%',
           height: '60%',
           slideshow: true
    });

    Now if you refresh the page in the browser, you'll see that after you open the Colorbox, it automatically cycles through the images, using whichever transition effect you've chosen. A link is provided so that site visitors can stop the slideshow at any time:

  2. Colorbox provides a few more keys we can use to control the slideshow. We can provide a value for slideshowSpeed to set the number of milliseconds each photo will be displayed. If we don't want the slideshow to automatically play, we can set slideshowAuto to false. We can change the text that appears in the link to start and stop the slideshow by passing in...