Many people on their own site want to see sliders - these are blocks that display one content element on the screen, and after a certain period of time change this content to another. Naturally, every web developer is able to independently create a slider using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but this does not always make sense. You will spend quite a lot of time, despite the fact that there are quite a few ready-made solutions on the Internet that make your life much easier and make your site much more attractive. This article will focus on one of these solutions called Owl Carousel. Setting up this slider is incredibly simple, so even a beginner can handle it. Now you will learn what this slider is, as well as other important details. Setting up Owl Carousel is a step-by-step process, so you should study this material in order only.
What is it and why should you choose this particular slider?
Owl Carousel, the configuration of which will be discussed in this article, is a very effective plugin that adds a beautiful and convenient slider to your page, which will greatly facilitate your work on the site,saving a lot of time, effort and money. What are the advantages of this particular plugin, because there are quite a lot of sliders on the Web? The fact is that this slider offers you dozens of customization options, which will allow you to make your page unique and inimitable. It is a responsive plugin that will work on all browser versions and can be easily connected to WordPress and other popular CMS. In general, this slider has a lot of advantages, so you should definitely make a choice in its favor. However, before you start setting up Owl Carousel, this plugin still needs to be loaded.
Download
Setting up Owl Carousel 2 is not possible if you have not downloaded it to your computer, and since this is a step-by-step instruction, you should start from the very beginning. So, the program can be downloaded using package managers, but these are advanced developer tools, so here we will tell you how to get this plugin in the standard way. You need to go to the official website of the plugin and download its latest version. After that, all downloaded files must be transferred to the directory of your site, having prepared a convenient folder, which is named the same as the plugin itself. Note that this plugin is bundled with jQuery, so you need to have that library available as well. Well, once you have downloaded this plugin, you will need to take care of the next step which is setting up the Owl Carousel slider 2.
CSS
BOwl Carousel 1.3 settings remain almost the same as in the newer version 2, only new features are added. However, the basic information will be the same, starting with adding CSS to your document. So the first step is to add the line. What does she give you? This is a string that loads the necessary styles to the site to display the slider. This is where you can finish by doing the visual processing yourself. However, there is a more convenient and faster solution. You can also add a line that also loads the slider's default theme, making it instantly ready to use. You can edit some of the styles to make your slider more unique and different, and more suitable for your content. Naturally, the Owl Carousel settings in Russian would be very convenient, but every person who creates websites should understand that he cannot do without knowledge of English.
JavaSpript connection
Of course, the slider will not work without JS, so you should also take care to include the appropriate file containing the necessary code. To do this, you need to insert a line of code from the documentation, however, one condition must be met. Everyone knows that JS is a programming language that executes all commands in order, so in this case you should add this line of code after the line that adds the jQuery library to your document. More with JS in the case of this slider, you have nothing to doneed.
HTML coding
Well, you've connected the slider, now it's time to design and customize it. First of all, you need to write the HTML code for the slider to appear on your page at all. To do this, you need to create a container that will contain the slides. This can be done using the div tag, which needs to be assigned the owl-carousel class. It is this class that ensures that all styles related to the slider will be activated. You can also write another class - owl-theme. It will come in handy if you decide to use the default design or take the standard version of the slider as a basis for further work.
Then you need to add each slide in a separate container with a div tag. Of course, you can use other tags, but this tag is the best for sliders.
Call plugin
And the last thing you need to do in order to have a ready-made slider on your site is to use this block of code:
$(document).ready(function(){
$(".owl-carousel").owlCarousel();
});
It ensures that the slider starts to function, i.e. scroll through the content, when your page loads. With the same code, you can connect Owl Carousel to WordPress. The settings of this plugin are numerous and varied, and now you will learn about the most key points.
Setting the look and functionality of the slider
So what commands can you use to customize your slider? First of all, you need to remember the items command, because with it you can set a specific number of slides in your slider. The loop command will allow you to choose whether to loop the slider or stop scrolling at the last element. There is also the Drag command, which has several options, such as mouse and touch. In the first case, you can make it so that the elements of your slider can be swiped with the mouse held down, and in the second case, with the help of a touch (this command is suitable for mobile devices). Another important command is nav, which enables the display of navigation arrows. Along with it, you can use the navText command to add labels to navigation buttons. Also, you should not forget about the autoplay command, which allows you to enable and disable the automatic start of turning the slides of your slider when the page loads. With this command, you can also use autoplayTimeout, for which you can set a specific value in milliseconds, which will determine the time between the automatic turning of each of the slides.
If you use responsive web design, that is, the design of your page automatically changes depending on which device it is viewed on, then you definitely need to remember the responsive command, which allows you to set the number of slides to display depending on the width of the screen the page is being viewed on.
