Storyline

Build beautiful landing pages that change as the user scrolls up or down.

Project created in 2013 and ported to GitHub in 2021.

Demo

Just visit this page for a short demo of the plugin and included console/debugger.

Getting started

Include the Storyline library

<script defer src="https://markjivko.com/storyline/js/storyline.min.js"></script>

Define your frames

$(document).ready(function(){
    $.storyline({
        frames: {
            'frameSelector': {
                onEnter: function(c,e){},
                onActive: function(c,e){},
                onLeave: function(c,e){},
                scrollIntoView: false
            }
        },
        // @see Options
    });
})

• 'frameSelector' - String; a selector for the target storyline frame.
• onEnter - Function; called when the frame becomes visible.
• onActive - Function; called while the frame is visible, on each scroll event.
• onLeave - Function; called when the frame becomes invisible to the user.
• scrollIntoView - Boolean; overrides the option with the same name; triggered 250ms after onEnter to perform a scrollIntoView action

You can add as many frame selectors as you wish. Each selector can point to either 1 HTML element (for instance, an #id selector) or to many HTML elements (a .class selector etc.).

Action parameters

Each action defined for the frame selectors (onEnter, onActive, onLeave) gets 2 extra parameters on each call.

• c - Object; frame coordinates:

{
    frameTop: 66, // Integer - distance from the frame to the top of the page (@see Options - frameTop)
    frameLeft: 8, // Integer - distance from the frame to the left side of the page
    frameBottom: 240, // Integer - distance from the frame to the bottom of the page
    frameRight: 8, // Integer - distance from the frame to the left side of the page
    frameWidth: 1247, // Integer - frame width in pixels
    frameHeight: 400, // Integer - frame height in pixels
    screenWidth: 1263, // Integer - screen width in pixels
    screenHeight: 706, // Integer - screen height in pixels
    screenScrollTop: 342, // Integer - how much the page was scrolled
    frameMiddleDistance: -77, // Integer - distance from the frame middle to the center of the screen
    percent: {
       screenPlayed=20.00, // Float - How much the page was scrolled; percent
       frameVisible=100.00, // Float - How much of the frame is visible; percent
       frameUnCentered=-21.81 // Float - How much is the frame off center; percent, -100 to +100
    }
}

• e - Object; scroll event.

You can use both of these objects to fully control the behavior of frame elements such as positions, colors, backgrounds etc. in a predictible, linear fashion.

Frame reference

Each action also gets a reference of the selector via the $(this) operator. Furthermore, the frame itself has an object atached:

$(this).data("frameInfo")
// Returns
{
    framePosition: 2, // Integer - frame index (1 to number of frames)
    frameSelector: '.frame2', // String - frame selector
    frameName: 'contact' // String - frame name (@see Options - buildMenu)
}

Options

You can further customize your storyline with the following options:

// Available options and their defaults
{
    frameTop: 0, // Distance from the focused frame to the window top
    guide: false, // Boolean - Show the storyline guide 
    buildMenu: false, // Boolean|Array - List of names for each frame
    menuSpeed: 1500, // Integer - Scroll duration for menu clicks
    tolerance: 20, // Integer - frame tolerance
    logLevel: 'debug', // String - log level,
    scrollIntoView: false, // Boolean - Default value for scroll into view
    ignoreWarnings: true // Boolean - If set to false, the storyline will fail on each error
}

Options - frameTop

This is used to set the distance from the focused frame to the top of the screen; useful for when a floating menu bar is fixed at the top of the screen.

Options - guide

Wether to show or hide the Storyline guide. If set to true, you will get a visual representation of each frame, its parameters, position, state etc. You will also get the Storyline Log showing you information such as debugging data, script information, errors etc.

Options - buildMenu

If you set this option to a valid array of strings, each one will be interpreted as the name of a frame, in the order passed to the frames key above. Plus, a menu will be constructed with the provided list of frame names; each time a user clicks on a menu item, the page will scroll to the correspondent frame.

Options - menuSpeed

If a menu was constructed an an user clicks on a menu item, this option sets the interval (in milliseconds) in which the page will scroll to the correspondent frame.

Options - tolerance

This is used to trigger the onEnter and onLeave actions more loosely. Test using the guide option set to true.

Options - scrollIntoView

This is triggered 250ms after onEnter and performs a scrollIntoView action. The homonymous parameter in frames overrides this global option.

Options - ignoreWarnings

If another option is set incorrectly and ignoreWarnings is set to True, the script will halt at the first encountered error.

Architecture

The plugin is very well commented. All strings are stored in a message variable.

{
    error:{}, // Error messages
    status:{}, // Status messages
    const:{} // Constants
}

The plugin also uses an error logging mechanism with log level filtering.

// Available log levels
logLevel = {
    debug:'debug',
    info:'info',
    error:'error'
}
// How to use
log(message.status.x, logLevel.debug); // Log a debugging message at index "x"
log(message.status.y, logLevel.info); // Log an information message at index "y"
log(message.error.z, logLevel.error); // Log an error message at index "z"

You can also set the log level by changing the logLevel option.

You can view the log either in the browser console or in the Storyline Log when the guide option is set to true.

Examples of sites using the Storyline plugin

• Mark Jivko | Portfolio
• APK Factory