The Carousel feature is a great way to add an element of action to your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community. Instead of your Featured Categories displaying as a static row in the widget, you can configure them to horizontally scroll!
📝 NOTE: The automatic horizontal scroll will become user-controlled (via left and right arrows) when the number of display columns is exceeded. Refer to Manual Scrolling, below, to learn more.
📝 IMPORTANT NOTE: The Carousel feature is unique to the Featured Categories widget and must be enabled, as described in the next section.
✔️ TIP: Be sure to test the Carousel option on your staging site before committing it to your production site.
Enable the Carousel feature
📝 NOTE: The Carousel feature is not enabled by default; you must enable it on the Featured Categories widget.
To enable the Carousel feature:
1. Navigate to Dashboard > Settings > Categories.
2. Edit the Featured Categories widget.
3. Scroll down to the As Carousel option and toggle it to the right (ON) to enable it.
4. Click Save.
The option is enabled and your featured Categories will scroll as a carousel in the widget!
Manual scrolling
If the Carousel option is enabled and the number of Featured Categories exceeds the Max Columns value, left and right arrows automatically display so that users can manually navigate through the Featured Categories widget tiles.
The arrows allow horizontal scrolling through the Featured Categories widget tiles.
📝 NOTE: This scrolling does not "cycle through" the tiles; when the left-most Featured Category tile is reached (as shown above), the left arrow is disabled. The user must use the right arrow and scroll in the opposite direction through the tiles.
Max Columns setting
Max Columns is the number of columns of widget tiles to display. When the number of widget tiles exceeds the Max Columns value, the widget tiles "line wrap" and display on additional rows.
⭐️ EXAMPLE: If there are five Featured Categories widget tiles and Max Columns is set to 3, tiles 4 and 5 display on a second row.
📝 NOTE: If the Carousel option is enabled, line wrapping does not occur. Instead, the widget tiles adopt the horizontal scroll functionality.
The Max Columns value can be set in two places:
- as a "global default" for all Featured Categories widgets, in the Widgets section of the Theme Editor, and
- "per widget" on the Add Pocket page (this setting overrides the global default value).
Featured Categories widget on mobile
When your Vanilla community is viewed on mobile devices (such as tablets and smartphones), the Featured Categories widget automatically:
- adjusts for the smaller screen widths and
- becomes a carousel that responds to tap and swipe actions on touch screen-enabled devices.
📝 NOTE: On mobile devices, the widget display is not dependent on the Max Columns value (described above) that influences the default "desktop" display.
