yii extension assistance - php

Question

I'm just starting to scratch the surface in yii and am having a heck of a time getting any image slider extensions to work. I've referenced http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/extension.use and believe my problem to be related to the initialization of the extension but am not sure. The most recent extension I'm attempting to use is http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/s3slider/.
So far I've downloaded the extension, unzipped and placed in /protected/extensions. I have two images I'm attempting to slide between located in /images. I've placed the suggested code in my /protected/views/layouts/main.php and updated the $images array as follows:
<?php
$this->widget('application.extensions.s3slider.S3Slider',
array(
'images' => array(
array('images/giveBack.png', 'Give Back'),
array('images/priceGuarantee.png', 'Price Guarantee'),
),
'width' => '420',
'height' => '300',
)
);?>
When I reload my page I get the following error:
PHP notice
Array to string conversion
/protected/extensions/s3slider/S3Slider.php(71)
59 $cssparams = array(
60 'name' => $this->name,
61 'width' => $this->width,
62 'height' => $this->height,
63 'opacity' => $this->opacity,
64 );
65 $clientScript->registerCssFile($baseUrl . '/s3Slider.css.php?data=' . urlencode(base64_encode(serialize($cssparams)))); //http_build_query($cssparams)
66
67 $clientScript->registerCoreScript('jquery');
68
69 $clientScript->registerScriptFile($baseUrl . '/s3Slider.js');
70
71 $js = "jQuery('#{$this->name}').s3Slider($options);";
72 $cs->registerScript('Yii.S3Slider' . $this->name, $js);
73 echo $this->makeImages();
74 }
75
76 }
77 ?>
My stack trace indicates:
/protected/views/layouts/main.php(60): CBaseController->widget("application.extensions.s3slider.S3Slider", array("images" => array(array("images/giveBack.png", "Give Back"), array("images/priceGuarantee.png", "Price Guarantee")), "width" => "420", "height" => "300"))
55 array('images/priceGuarantee.png', 'Price Guarantee'),
56 ),
57 'width' => '420',
58 'height' => '300',
59 )
60 );?>
61
62 <?php
63 $this->widget('zii.widgets.CBreadcrumbs', array(
64 'links'=>$this->breadcrumbs,
65 )); ?><!-- breadcrumbs -->
Any guidance on this would be much appreciated!
Thank you.

Answer 1

You successfully installed this extension, however there is a obvious bug in it.
Note, that at line 52 $options is declared
$options = array();
Then it is checked if not empty:
if (!empty($options)) {
$options = CJavaScript::encode($options);
}
So $options is empty, so it is not encoded to string with encode, so in:
$js = "jQuery('#{$this->name}').s3Slider($options);";
PHP shows notice about array to string conversion. Remove condition for checking if empty, and it will encode empty array and should work. Author of extension probably has notices disabled, which is bad practice. It is wise to see notices at development stage.
HINT: When you get better in yii, writing extension wrapper for jquery plugins will be snap for you.