I'm looking for an extension that will allow us to display a rotating set of images advertising different areas of the website, with each image being a different clickable link to a site location. We don't want to clutter up our homepage with a bunch of visitor-unfriendly links, but we want people to discover more of the site's content. We currently use the Flash Slideshow extension to do rotating image banners, but it doesn't do discrete links per image. Has anyone run across a good way to accomplish this?

Jay,
I don't know if you've ventured into the world of Flexible Content Elements yet, but my guess is that most people are using custom FCEs for this kind of thing now. I did try to search the repository, but I didn't see any clear candidates. macina_banners is probably the most popular banner extension but I'm not sure that it does rotation without custom templating.

Thanks,
Jeff

The only experience I have with FCEs is using one that Ron Hall of BusyNoggin made for us to do a 2 column content element. My feeling is that creating something like this from scratch is over my head and probably wouldn't give me quite the effect I'm looking for. The ric_slideshow extension is based on Macina but seems to only offer a single link. It may be possible to use a photo gallery in slideshow mode but that seems like a cludgy solution, if it would even work.

I have just found and implemented a solution to accomplish exactly what I wanted and I thought I should share it here.

I found an extension called Random Images (maag_randomimage) which will pull images from a directory and rotate through them. It provides a pretty straightforward interface for creating unique links per image (you place a text file with the a url in the same folder as the image with the same prefix as the image). The extension does nice transitions between images and can display a big version of an image on mouseover. This extension is very configurable and flexible and can even be implemented through Typoscript.

I was able to very quickly implement a test billboard that rotates through various church topics that link to their page on the site when clicked. I think this extension would be a valuable tool in anybody's toolbox.

Hi Jay,

Thanks for sharing this resource!

Could you post a link to where you have implemented the extension? I looked at the Mckinney site and didn't find it on there.

Thanks,
David

Georg Ringer's Image Slideshow (rgslideshow) can be configured to link through from the various images placed on a home page. It complements the Smooth gallery

http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/rgslideshow/1.3.0/

Cheers -- Tony Lush