[Imc-uk-features] Ticker display on the front page

[Chris]

Hi

We need to display the ticker on the front page and this
was discussed in a irc meeting tonight.

A traditional ticker looks like the one here:

  http://globalresearch.ca/

And the BBC have a implementation that doesn't move done
with flash:

  http://news.bbc.co.uk/

But neither of these styles would work since the ticker
entries are longer than just a title, see:

  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/ticker/

So how abouyt something like this:

  http://javascriptkit.com/dhtmltutors/ajaxticker/ajaxticker4.shtml

Or:

  http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/rsstickerajax/index.htm

In both case the second example with the longer text.

Things like the display time and size of items could be
tweaked.

Of course I'm not a massive Javascript fan but I think
this is a sensible use of it, we could display some text
like this if people have js disabled in their browser:

  The news ticker would display here if you had Javascript
  enabled. You can selectively enable Javascript on a
  per-site basis if you use http://noscript.net/ with
  Firefox.

Shiar was also going to write up the archiving ideas and I
was going to leave this to him but this is what I think
we agreed on:

I'm not sure how it would work but we would only want the
ticker to display on the front page when there is a action
going on for which the ticker is being used. Something
like an on/off switch in admin. 

Then we need to be able to assign an existing action topic
to each ticker item.

Each action topic page with some ticker items could
display the latest ones for that action topic and link to
the archive page for the ticker for this action, eg:

  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/actions/2007/dsei/ticker.html

The main ticker page here:

  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/ticker/
  
Could then simply display all the latest ticker items
regardless of the topic, the same for the ticker rss feed
and the front page of the site, this keeps things simple.

Chris

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