Anyone have personal experience with the following slider / rotator modules for Drupal?

Question

Based on this post, I'm noticing that slideshow/ slider / rotator modules are still a bit of an unsettled issue in Drupal (6).

My goal is to have a simple rotating gallery at the top of my homepage, rotating between several featured nodes, complete with a few cck elements (title, short summary, and an image).

Right now I'm stuck between several modules:

• Views Cycle
• Views Slideshow
• Featured Content Slider

Anyone have any personal experience with any modules mentioned here? Specific recommendations or gotchas are most appreciated.

Obviously style is subjective, so I'm looking for ease of integration, ease of updating the contents of the widget, etc. (Edit: level of community support is also quite useful)

Answer 1

The most recommended is the one that best suites your needs?

I would say Views Slideshow is the best approach. It leverages Views effectively, has minimal requirements, and is built pluggable--you can use a number of modules that build on it to create different affects.

But if your design goals and that point doesn't move you in a direction, a little empirical review of module health is a great way to make a selection.

• Featured Content Slider: 1,048 active sites.
• Views Cycle: 2,077 active sites.
• Views Slideshow: 28,982 active sites.

There are other metrics to check, like how recently and how often there are CVS commits, how many issues are in the queue, and what is the ratio of open/closed issues. And so on.

You want a module that will do the job, stay current, and have enough interested people in the community to be sure that someone will want to step up if the current maintainer decides to go work with Django for a while.