showplus Documentation

Quick start

Below you find instructions on how to install and set up showplus with Joomla 3.0 and later.

Joomla 3.0 and later Joomla 3.x

  1. Log in to the Joomla administration back-end.
  2. Select Extensions / Manage / Install from the top menu.
  3. In the panel Upload package file, click Browse and locate the installation package you have downloaded to your local computer.
  4. Click the button Upload & Install.
  5. Select Extensions / Modules from the top menu.
  6. Click showplus in the list and open it.
  7. In the extension-specific configuration panel on the left, type the path to the folder where your images to display in the slideshow are, e.g. images/headers.
  8. In the general module configuration panel on the right-hand size, select Published from the drop-down list Status.
  9. Finally, go through either the (a) or (b) series of steps.

    (a) In order to use the slideshow as a regular module:

    1. In the general module configuration panel, click the drop-down list Position and choose a template position from the list.
    2. On the tab Menu assignment, choose the menu items where the module will display (e.g. On all pages, or Only on the pages selected and tick some of the checkboxes).
    3. Click Save and you are all set.

    (b) In order to put the slideshow in the text of an article:

    1. In the general module configuration panel, type your own name in the text box Position, e.g. myslideshow.
    2. In the panel Menu assignment, choose On all pages from the drop-down list Module assignment.
    3. Click Save & Close.
    4. Select Extensions / Plugins from the top menu.
    5. Find Content - Load modules in the list and make sure it is enabled.
    6. In the text of an article, type {loadposition myslideshow}. (For this step, do not use copy-and-paste.)
  10. Do you like showplus? Please consider registering and submitting a vote and/or review in the JED.

Adding captions to images

To attach captions to images in a slideshow, the steps to take are as follows. Suppose you would like to add labels to the images drawn from the folder fruit inside the folder stories. The files you are interested in are cherry.jpg, pears.jpg and strawberry.jpg, which you have already uploaded with Media Manager in the Joomla administration back-end.

  • Create a text file called labels.txt on your computer.
  • For each image, add a caption line with a vertical bar separating file name, image target link and caption text. All data related to an image should go in a single line but different images should have their own separate line. The image target link, which should be an absolute URL (typically starting with http: or https:), lets you hyperlink to a custom location: when the image is shown in the slideshow and the visitor clicks the image, they are taken to the location specified. Caption text is any free-format text, which appears at the bottom of the slideshow. (Caption text can contain HTML tags but make sure you close any tags you open, e.g. <a>text</a> but not <a>text) In our example, this means labels.txt could have the following contents:
cherry.jpg|Cherry: the first item in my fruit collection.
pears.jpg|http://hunyadi.info.hu|Pears: the second item in my fruit collection.
strawberry.jpg|Strawberry: the third item in my fruit collection.
  • Save the file.
    For text that contains non-English characters, users should save their file with UTF-8 encoding. If you have used Notepad (shipped with Windows) to edit the file, choose Save as… from the File menu, and set Encoding at the bottom of the pop-up dialog box to UTF-8.
  • Use the Media manager (or an FTP client) to upload labels.txt to the folder fruit where your images are.

Should you run into problems with using a labels file, below are points you might pay attention to:

  • The file labels.txt should go into the same folder where your images are. The configuration page in administration back-end has a checkbox that indicates whether showplus can find the labels file.
  • If you have accented characters or special symbols, you must save the file in UTF-8 encoding. Misleading as it may be, certain dash characters and quotes count as special symbols.
  • Do not put spaces around the vertical bar, i.e. avoid cherry.jpg  |  Cherry; spaces will be included in the file name.
  • Capitalization matters. For servers running UNIX-like operating systems (which includes servers by most hosting providers), labels.txt and labels.TXT are different files. Windows tends to assign capitalized extension in some cases, which should be avoided.