Vertical Sliding Accordion with jQuery

From our sponsor: Build skills to lead communication strategy, translate complex data, and drive user experience.

Today we want to share a slick and flexible vertical jQuery accordion with you. The main idea is to expand the accordion slices on click and show some more information. The other slices will become less opaque and squeezed. When navigating to the next slice using one navigation arrows, a new slice will slide in from the top or the bottom. Once a slice is open and we navigate, the subsequent slice will open on slide.

The beautiful portrait photography is by Images by Alan Turkus. Check out his Flickr Photostream. The images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License.

We also use the jQuery Mousewheel Plugin by Brandon Aaron which allows us to navigate through the accordion using the mouse wheel.

The options for this plugin allow to customize the height and width, the number of slices visible, the height of an expanded slice and others. Let’s first see some examples before we explain each option.

Examples

Take a look at all the examples (you can also navigate from them to all the other demos):

• 3 visible slices / Default
• With easing
• 5 visible Slices and higher transparency
• 2 visible slices and slower animation
• Fullscreen example

For the HTML structure we have the accordion container, the navigation spans and the wrapper with the slices:

<div id="va-accordion" class="va-container">
	<div class="va-nav">
		<span class="va-nav-prev">Previous</span>
		<span class="va-nav-next">Next</span>
	</div>
	<div class="va-wrapper">
		<div class="va-slice va-slice-1">
			<h3 class="va-title">Marketing</h3>
			<div class="va-content">
				<p>Henry Watson</p>
				<ul>
					<li><a href="#">About</a></li>
					<li><a href="#">Portfolio</a></li>
					<li><a href="#">Contact</a></li>
				</ul>
			</div>
		</div>
		<div class="va-slice va-slice-2">
			...
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

We give each slice a different class to define a background image for them. In the last fullscreen example we have color classes to assign a different background color to each slice.

Let’s take a look at the example with just 2 slices and a slower animation speed:

$('#va-accordion').vaccordion({
	expandedHeight	: 350,
	animSpeed		: 400,
	animOpacity		: 0.7,
	visibleSlices	: 2
});

The following options are available:

// the accordion's width
accordionW		: 1000,
// the accordion's height
accordionH		: 450,
// number of visible slices
visibleSlices	: 3,
// the height of a opened slice
// should not be more than accordionH
expandedHeight	: 350,
// speed when opening / closing a slice
animSpeed		: 250,
// easing when opening / closing a slice
animEasing		: 'jswing',
// opacity value for the collapsed slices
animOpacity		: 0.2,
// time to fade in the slice's content
contentAnimSpeed: 900,
// if this is set to false,
// we collapse any opened slice
// before sliding
savePositions	: true

If you, for example, would like to show a slice fully on expansion, using the whole height of the accordion container, then you set the expandedHeight to the same value like the accordionH (the height of the accordion). In our last example we used the full window width and height and also adjusted some style (see inline style in the example) in order to remove any margins:

$('#va-accordion').vaccordion({
	accordionW		: $(window).width(),
	accordionH		: $(window).height(),
	visibleSlices	: 5,
	expandedHeight	: 450,
	animOpacity		: 0.1,
	contentAnimSpeed: 100
});

We hope you like this accordion and find it useful!