Using the BBC style news ticker in Drupal

Version 2.x of my jQuery news ticker plug-in requires jQuery 1.4.x. (The plugin site lists it as 1.3 compatible because it still doesn’t let me mark it as 1.4!)

Normally this won’t result in any difficulties in using it because you can drop the relevant version of jQuery into your site, but if you’re implementing the ticker on a Drupal 6 site, version 2.x won’t work because Drupal ships with jQuery 1.2, and even the jquery_update module can only bring you up to jQuery 1.3. Now, while it’s possible to just add a call to jQuery 1.4 onto the relevant page(s), Drupal will still load 1.3 as well and it won’t work in IE, as can be seen happening on makemineatriple.com/jquery - hence the paragraph at the bottom of that page.

To run the news ticker on a Drupal 6 site you therefore have three options, and the right choice will depend on how technical you are, what else you’re running in terms of modules, and whether you actually need the features added by version 2.x of the ticker.

1. Run the latest 1.x version of the ticker (you can download this from my plugin page on the jQuery website). You won’t get the “controls” or the ability to stop on hover, so if those are important to you then you’ll need to consider option 2 or 3.
2. Fiddle with jQuery update to make it run 1.4. This is perfectly easy to do, but whether it’s a suitable solution for you depends on what else you’re using on your site: some Drupal modules aren’t compatible with 1.4, it seems. See the existing 1.4 compatibility issue ticket for the jquery module for more info and to help you decide whether doing this might break other functionality. Essentially you just need to replace the jquery*.js files in the module’s “replace” subfolder with the 1.4 versions and do the usual cache flush etc.
3. Finally, if you’re particularly technically-inclined, you could write a little module to mimic jquery_update’s behaviour specifically on the page(s) on which you want to use the ticker, bringing in jQuery 1.4 instead of the version used elsewhere on your site. Should you choose to do this, please do drop me a line - I’d be very interested in taking a look, and I’m sure others would be too.

On the other hand, if you’re running Drupal 7, you’ll be fine because Drupal 7 uses jQuery 1.4. You can sit back and relax instead :-)