Welcome to the rotators and Slideshows series. This series will walk you through how to get the most out of the Views Slideshow module, and teach you all of the ins and outs of the configuration. We'll also take a look at the Flex Slider module and how it can be used to create quick and easy (but less flexible) image slideshows. At the end of the series, you will have everything you need to comfortably create whatever type of slideshow you like, whether it be an image slideshow, or a slideshow of site content.

We'll start out by Installing all of the necessary modules and libraries for Views Slideshow. Then, we'll create the image styles we need, and create both a page and block display for our slideshow. We'll also see how easy it is to add additional fields to our slideshow whether they be image fields, or text fields.

We'll walk through all of the Views Slideshow settings in-depth, and we'll see how to use numbers, as well as images, as pagers.

Then, we'll create a content slideshow that cycles through the most recent five blog posts, so that instead of simply listing blog titles, we can include a snippet of the article to increase reader interest, all without taking up too much screen space.

We'll also see how to link to any webpage, instead of being restricted to the full display of the slideshow content.

Finally, we'll explore the Flex Slider module, and how it can be used to quickly setup image slideshows with and without the Views module. We'll also make note of some of the benefits and limitations of Flex Slider when compared to Views Slideshow.