Our eyes are drawn to images far more powerfully than text — even more so when those images are in motion. That’s not news, but anyone who’s seen internet marketing metrics knows how dramatic and powerful the difference between text and graphic content is.
Image sliders are a staple of web pages, but they’re typically used in marketing contexts and not frequently associated with technical or procedural documentation. But to communicate the essential things to the team or customer, to keep everyone focused on the right things, there’s nothing quite like the steady feed of highly visual information from Confluence pages they visit daily.
Yet, often in online documentation, some of the most effective ways to present and highlight mission-critical information gets overlooked.
Increasing your messaging effectiveness with sliders
While you can embed visual content in Confluence pages right out of the box, there are no native tools that let you package and present content in a slide-show fashion. Image Slider app from Appfire helps you make your Confluence pages more visual.
The app installs easily in your Confluence instance and provides a simple forms-based UI that lets users customize the size, content, speed of presentation, and numerous other details.
The Image Slider for Confluence helps you get the message across by focusing your Confluence users on the most urgent and vital information for your team, prospects, and existing customers.
Not just images, but nearly any content composed in the Confluence editor can be presented as an automated slide show.
In practice, Image Slider is composed of two distinct macros.
Image Slider for Confluence
A straightforward way to create a gallery in Confluence and rotate through image-based slides, on a timer, or by letting the user do it manually.
Content Slider for Confluence
Compose slides using the same elements you build the Confluence page itself.
These macros are mobile compatible, fully responsive, and touch-enabled with keyboard navigation support.
Make the most of your images and content
Image Slider for Confluence gives you the tools to focus your team, prospects, and existing customers on the message you want them to hear.
- Use the Content Slider macro to slide through rich page content like formatted text, tables, links, charts, and more – not just images, but nearly any content composed in Confluence can be presented as an automated slide show.
- Collect images from multiple pages or blog posts by label, or from other spaces.
- Use attachment comments automatically as image captions.
- Link images to the pages or blog posts they are attached to, e.g., to create a blogpost teaser on your dashboard.
- Choose from multiple different transition effects.
- Configure options like thumbnail navigation, speed of presentation, and the size of slides.
Image Slider is fully responsive, mobile compatible, and touch-enabled with support for keyboard navigation.
Setup and configuration
Image Slider’s drop-in macros are selected from the Confluence macro library in edit mode.
Building an interactive slide show or a gallery is just the start. Using the slider in Confluence couldn’t be more straightforward. Whether you share your Confluence pages with clients or just internal teams, the image slider is a unique tool for calling attention to your latest initiative, new policies, upcoming products, or highlights of existing products.
How Confluence image slider works
Once you have the content, it takes only a few minutes to create a set of slides and publish the slider on a page. By default, you can select images from any already attached to the page, so they’re uploaded as you would normally, using native Confluence tools.
After adding the macro to the page, users can select the image to apply to each slide.
Easily fine-tune and customize the display:
- Control the width and height of the published slider frame.
- Select Stretch or Crop and Resize to fit images perfectly.
- Sort the order of presentation by date, randomly, or alpha by filename.
- Use the native Confluence image comments as the caption for the slides.
- Transition between slides with a fade or a horizontal translation.
- Show or hide manual navigation buttons.
- Show or hide thumbnail navigation buttons.
- Speed control — set the interval for slide changes, the speed of transition, or turn off automation and let the user control the show!
Image Slider lets you display clickable thumbnails for navigation by mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen.
How Confluence content slider works
With the Content Slider, you can compose each slide as if it were a miniature Confluence page or an excerpt.
Every slide is its little container of content, and you can edit it directly in the Confluence editor or paste a block of nearly anything captured from any page in the Wiki.
What can it display? Almost anything a Confluence page can. Although it’s in a smaller frame, you can include formatted text, images (but if you’re using images only, Image Slider comes together more quickly), tables, and formatting-related macros. Even other macros that link information from Github and Jenkins to create slides with dynamic content that displays as a sequence of frames.
Easily fine-tune and customize the display:
- Control the width and height of the published slider frame.
- Select the background canvas color for your slides.
- Transition between slides with a fade or a horizontal translation.
- Show or hide manual navigation buttons.
- Speed control — set the interval for slide changes, the speed of transition, or turn off automation and let the user control the show!
It’s hard to overestimate the power of images. They can lead your readers to the essential information in Confluence to effectively communicate your message to the team, the customer, or your partners. With Appfire’s Image Slider for Confluence, you can take your pages from good to awesome in just minutes.
Last updated: 2023-07-31
Appfire
Appfire is an enterprise collaboration software company that enables teams to plan and deliver their best work. Since launching in 2005 as one of the original Atlassian ecosystem partners, Appfire has built a portfolio of top-selling apps for more than 30,000 customers — including 55% of Fortune 500 companies. As a product-led company, Appfire identifies gaps in industries serving developers and client support teams and then builds solutions that drive productivity and efficiency.
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