A Joomla component that we have used on several recent projects is Vivid Content. It's perfect for rotating graphical header images and portfolio presentations.

Here's our brief review.

There are many other image presentation components and modules out there but the key advantage that Vivid offers is an easy-to-use administration system. At Fresh Aspect we endeavour to develop sites that our business users can manage for themselves. Embedding special tags in content or other complex control mechanisms are things we do not consider acceptable in this context.

Vivid in its current incarnation (2.3.2) uses the twin concepts of slide groups and slides. Slides are individual photographs or images which can have titles, links and text associated with them (or these can be automatically derived from Joomla content items). Slides can then be placed into slide groups. The slide group settings control how the slides are presented.

Joomlastop have done an excellent job of providing a highly comprehensive range of settings that allow for fine grained control of the appearance of the slides. Slides can be displayed using AJAX Jscript or Flash. The Flash system is much more flexible and is the only system we have really put through its paces.

Slide timings, transitions and even a thumbnail carousel can all be tightly controlled to deliver a polished high-quality presentation of the images.

The settings have been added over successive versions and could do with some tidying up to improve usability. You have to be careful not to make your presentations appear like over animated Powerpoints but with a bit of effort and design some great results can be achieved.

As a quick sample of what can be produced, we use Vivid to display examples of some our recent work.

Update 21/08/07: Due to the Joomla teams shift regarding commercial extensions Vivid Content is sadly no longer available.