Displaying multiple referenced nodes' fields through Views, using Views Slideshow

Question

I'm trying to build some image carousel functionality. To accomplish this, I've created two content types: Slideshow, and Slide. The Slide content type is what you would expect--a few fields that hold the content of the slide. The Slideshow content type's only purpose is to hold an ordered collection of slides in an Entity Reference field.

The advantage to this approach is that the use of an Entity Reference field means that the content administrator gets a drag'n'droppable UI for the ordering of slides, which is much nicer than some clunky integer weight fields.

So, having got that part set up, I scoot off to Views to work some magic with Views Slideshow. I create a view which calls up my Slideshow node and uses a relationship based on that Entity Reference field to get to the Slide nodes. With that, I can set up the fields of the slides how I like.

The last step would've been switching to the Slideshow view format and configuring the thing, but it was here that I ran into a problem. After I got things set up the way I thought they should be, I found that only the first slide's node was being displayed.

I did my Googling, and I found another question here on Drupal Answers that was similar to mine, which you'll need to read to understand the rest of my question. Reading through it, I tried out the solution that one kind soul provided, and it worked. But it required that I switch from the Slideshow view format to the Unformatted List view format.

So now it appears that I have a choice: I show all the slides as an unformatted list, which is not a slideshow. Or, I can show one of slides as a slideshow, which is not a slideshow.

This bums me out, because I thought I found an almost perfect setup. A content-manageable slideshow with an easy-to-use UI that didn't require the client to understand weight numbers and struggle through the tedium of setting them up. Can anyone help me jump over this roadblock?

Answer 1

I don't know if it's possible to do this with views_slideshow but I just created a patch for the field_slideshow module. It will be committed once I have tested it a little more or there is some feedback.

The Field Slideshow module page.

The issue with the patch.

And the documentation page: drupal.org/node/1495622

So once you have installed the dependancies and libraries here is how to download and apply the patch:

git clone --recursive --branch 7.x-1.x http://git.drupal.org/project/field_slideshow.git
cd field_slideshow 
wget http://drupal.org/files/entity_reference_support-1634412-3.patch
git apply entity_reference_support-1634412-3.patch

Then enable the module and go to your content type display setting page ( something like admin/structure/types/manage/article/display ). Here you should be able to define the format of the reference field to be a slideshow.