Articles Side-by-Side

Hey man. I haven't upgraded Pro News yet (still on v.1) but I want to incorporate something now and when I upgrade as well, with my layout on the Home page. I don't want to use headlines, as I like the entire article showing up. I would like to have the articles 50% size and side-by-side, as illustrated in the graphic. 1, 2, then 3, 4, etc. I like having articles in Home but they are soooo wide (check my www to see). Most of our articles are small in size, so having them 50% of the center won't be an issue. I like the way it looks a lot! I know this is a table thing in indexsp.html (the template I'm using), but I fiddled with it and went to the stylesheet to get what you see below.

I know I need to make the upgrade change, and I will do that shortly...but I will still be using my own template, which I love. Pro News has been the best thing I have installed in DF since I started using it...

If you can guide me a bit that would be great...

chris5000 please enter your server specs in your user profile!

Hmmm. Not something I think I can do! Some pointers though ...

I can't see how you could do this in HTML tables without modifying the code - you *MIGHT* be able to do it with the templates, but I would be surprised. The templates send data for 1 article, but you want a 'parent' table for all articles. Which means you have to be able to detect the 1st and last article at least (and keep track on whether you are even or odd ...). The headlines does keep track of 1st article, but not last, so you could try moving the code over, but ...

The better way to do this would be in CSS, i.e. a table-free implementation. Later versions, and later templates, have more CSS and less HTML. You can look to see in indexsp.html - if you have that in your version - has more CSS, or you can look at the templates in latter versions and map over what you need.

Once you have your existing in CSS then you could look at how to do the doubling up on a line. If you look at the indexglry.html in the latest couple of releases handles images, you should be able to do similar with articles. Basically you set every article to be float left, and using a container div or similar, set the width of an article to be =< 50% of your main width, and they'll wrap up on their own. Fortunately you have a fixed width theme, so no need to worry about 3+ columns if their window width is wider.

A lot of experimenting, trial and error. Good luck. And I'd be happy to let you post it here when you're done, or include it in a future release with full credit to you.

But if I were you, I'd not put this much effort in until I'd upgraded Pro_News, and probably DF too. Else 1 day...

Moving this to Community - perhaps someone else will want to work with you on it.

Thanks. I will give it a try for sure. I like full articles in Home but they take up more space than I would like. I WILL be upgrading Pro News but I remember that awful issue I had before and am just a bit scared to do it on the only DF site I have at the moment.

I am setting up another new DF site soon and will certainly put on DF 9.2.1 and PN 2.

chris5000 please enter your server specs in your user profile!

XAMPP (or XAMPPLite) on your local system. How you can do HTML or CSS development without it is beyond me! It can only be because you haven't tried it the other way!!! Imagine, edit the HTML - or CSS - file, save and hit refresh and see the result. No upload, no waiting, no fuss, and no witnesses

It can be a bit fiddly enabling your copied SQL db 'cos of config.php, passwords, etc., but you only have do that once, and you have a replica of your system to upgrade, tweak, etc.

have a look here it may help
dragonflycms.org/Forum...ic/t=6318/

Although it is written around the standard news module. I am sure it could be adapted