Scrolling Ads? Live scrolling widget, not random on refresh

Question

I have a current job where my client has requested to have their "sponsors" rotate in the sidebar widget. Right now I have a random ad widget which rotates them randomly...

I was wanting to know if there is a plugin or a way to make a number of image ads slide, or rotate live when you are on the page not via refresh and random.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I looked for one of these recently, as I have seen them, but I believe they are only bundled with some commercial themes.

I ended up making one using CPT's and jQuery Tools, it was pretty simple. The steps,

1. Create a CPT with only the featured image upload ( to keep ad size to 175px x 150px in my case) and 1 meta box for the ad link url.
2. Create a function that uses WP_Query to get the ads from the CPT.
3. In you're template ( or function) wrap the query function in the necessarily div class's and id's that are used by the JavaScript.

That was about it, jQuery Tools and jQuery UI both support auto-scrolling and circular looping, so no matter how many ads you have the are always showing in a seamless loop.

ps. I do have this on github as a plugin, but it is not user friendly at all, if you're a developer you might find it useful but it was written very quickly and only works for a horizontal slider.

Answer 2

UPDATE I ended up using the promo slider plugin which you can get here it worked great. I customized the css slightly and its easy to use and easy to set to custom sizes. Its generally made for a full size slider, I just shrunk it down to 250x375 for my ad space. You can see it live in the bottom right of this site here.