Wishlist: Widget to Share Carousel on External Site

[John Yorio]

Evergreen 3.4

Some libraries have expressed a desire to share their carousels on an external site, such as the library's own web site.

There does not currently appear to be a way to do this, so I'm posting this here for discussion/feedback.

Some kind of widget that could be embedded on the external page seems ideal, but even something like the RSS for public bookbags might be helpful.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

We've had this request from multiple libraries in our consortium as well.

[Jeremiah Miller (jeremym-t)]

We have something like (but not nearly as functional as) carousels on our main website, fed by RSS feeds from public bookbags, most of which are updated by scripts, a few by hand.

Was hoping to replace them with carousels, but... no way to embed or refer to them on an external or 3rd party site. Then was hoping to at least use the RSS feeds from them, since they are essentially public bib buckets (akin to public bookbags)... but no, can't do that either.

Staff also mentioned that it would be nice if the title could be a link, clicking on which would take you to the entire list in question.

[Jeremiah Miller (jeremym-t)]

By "clicking on the title", I mean the title of the carousel (not an individual record within it).

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

+1 to making the title linkable to the full list. It seems like the https://(domain)/eg/opac/results?bookbag=(number) format should work to display a carousel bucket like it does for a shared list bucket.

[Lindsay Stratton (lstratton)]

Westchester libraries would also love to have Evergreen carousels available to their external websites. Our libraries use a lot of search boxes embedded on their websites, and bypass the opac main page entirely.

[Jennifer Bruch (jbruchpails)]

+1 to both ideas for the PaILS/SPARK Libraries

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

There may very well be a better way to do this, but this works in my testing:

https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/mccanna/lp1944755_carousel_breakout

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

For testing during Bug Squashing Week:
Carousels have been created at the consortium level and for BR1, so can be loaded as:

https://terran-testbox.gapines.org/eg/opac/carousel?carousel_loc=1
and
https://terran-testbox.gapines.org/eg/opac/carousel?carousel_loc=4

To test embedding in an iframe on a web site, sample iframe code is:

<iframe src="(my opac domain)/eg/opac/carousel?carousel_loc=4" title="Carousel"
width="80%" height="500px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>

[Jeff Davis (jdavis-sitka)]

I opened bug 1951318 about implementing an API call to return the contents of a given carousel. I think it's complementary to this bug rather than a duplicate -- the API method would return similar data, but not in a format that can be plugged directly into an existing website (i.e., not a "widget").

[Garry Collum (gcollum)]

In test this works well, but one suggestion might be to have the target of the links going to the catalog be _blank, instead of _top. If there is other content on the page, or more than one carousel on the page, rendering the catalog's page within the same page as the iframe causes some odd overlapping.

[Garry Collum (gcollum)]

A test page with iframes is at https://displays.kentonlibrary.org/test/carousel.html

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

My intention for using _top is to ensure that it breaks out of the iframe (and any other frame it might be nested inside) entirely. I felt like that was the best way to get people into the full catalog and not get them trapped inside an unexpected wrapper.

Noting that it does look nicer with some judicious changes to the carousel CSS. This test page shows a carousel being pulled from the live PINES server first and from the vanilla test server second.

https://pines.georgialibraries.org/test

(The CSS changes I made locally on PINES hide the nav arrows at small window sizes, use a smaller cover image, control the cover image height rather than width for consistency, etc. I also have the carousel setting enabled to auto-progress rather than requiring clicking or manual scrolling.)

[Garry Collum (gcollum)]

A sign-off branch is at https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/gcollum/lp1944755_carousel_breakout-signoff

[Mike Rylander (mrylander)]

Merged to master. Thanks, Terran and Garry!

[Gina Monti (gmonti90)]

Question on this API fix. I have all of the files in place for our local repo but sometimes the link doesn't show the carousels and instead gives me the login page. Here's one example we have:

<iframe src="https://gunn.biblio.org/eg/opac/carousel?carousel_loc=1" title="Carousel"
width="100%" height="500px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>

I'm using Google Sites for testing. It definitely was working before I went back to check in on this some time later after setting it up.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

Gina - that's very strange, I haven't seen that happen on our server. I can confirm if I try to go directly to https://gunn.biblio.org/eg/opac/carousel?carousel_loc=1 that it redirects me to your login page. That makes me think that EGCatLoader.pm is the culprit - did you restart everything after applying the change?

[Gina Monti (gmonti90)]

It seems that some websites such as Wix has an issue with iframe.