I recently had a site that I do volunteer work for ask me if I could create an image slideshow for them on the home page of their Drupal 5.x-powered site. They wanted to showcase various large images on their homepage fading from one to another, as well as be able to control what images were contained in the slideshow. The solution had to be easy to use and maintain as they don't have a dedicated IT person on staff.

Having just viewed Sean Effel's excellent screencast for doing just about the exact thing I needed in Drupal 6, I decided to write this article as a similar exercise for Drupal 5.

To get started, here's the modules you'll need installed and enabled:

Content (CCK)
ImageField
ImageAPI (including ImageAPI GD2 or ImageAPI ImageMagick)
ImageCache (and ImageCache UI)
Views (and Views UI)
Views Slideshow

We're going to be building a image slideshow using a fairly large image: 800 pixels wide by 400 pixels high. The first thing we'll do it set up an ImageCache preset to automatically scale and crop the images to the proper size. Go to "Administer|Site Building|ImageCache" and click the tab to "Add New Preset". Set the namespace to something like "slideshow_image". Then, add a new "Scale And Crop" action. Set the width and height appropriately. When complete, your preset should look like this:

Next up, we need to create a content type that our slideshow will pull from. Go to "Administer|Content management|Content Types" and click on the "Add content type" tab. Here's the settings I used:

Name: Slideshow Image
Type: slideshow_image
Body field label: (blank)
Default options: Published
Default comment setting: Disabled

Everything else I left at their default values. Next, add an imagefield to the new content type by clicking on "edit" for the "Slideshow Image" content type, and then clicking on the "Add field" tab. Name the field "Photo" and select the "Image" field type. On the Photo field settings page, leave all the default settings except to select the "Required" checkbox. Here's what my completed content type looked like on the "Manage Fields" tab:

At this point, stop and add a few photos via Create Content|Slideshow Image. Go ahead, I'll wait.

All set? Good. Now that we have some images uploaded, it's time to put everything all together. Go to "Administer|Site Building|Views" to create a new view that takes advantage of the Views Slideshow display option. From the main Views page, click the "Add" tab. The view we need to build is fairly simple - here's settings I used:

Basic Information
Name: homepage_slideshow

Block
Provide Block: checked
View Type: Slideshow List
Nodes per Block: 10

Fields
Add "Image: Photo (field_photo) and chang it's "option" to "slideshow_image" - remember, this is the ImageCache preset we set up in the first step. This tells the view how to display the photo.

Filters
Add "Node: Type Is One Of Slideshow Image" - this limits the view to only show our "Slideshow Image" content type.
Also, don't forget to add "Node: Published Equals Yes" - for completeness.

The only thing that is left to do is to display the block on the home page of the site! Go to "Administer|Site Building|Blocks" and move the "homepage_slideshow" block to the "content" region (depending on your site, you might want to put it someplace else). Also, be sure to click to "configure" the block to only appear on the home page:

That's all there was too it to get a basic slideshow working! You can customize your slideshow at "Administer|Site Building|Views|Views slideshow configuration". Settings include the slideshow's speed and sort order, among others. You can further customize the slideshow by tweaking the "homepage_slideshow" view as well as the Imagecache preset settings.

I've gone ahead and attached exported versions of both the view and content type I created in this article - feel free to download them below.