I’m trying to do a letters to the editor feature on my home page, that is set up very much like a newspaper as opposed to a blog.
I’ve basically got three columns on the page, with the sidebar always occupying the far right column. There is one lead news story with photos etc at the top right that spans two columns. Beneath it there are two columns with shorter story excerpts and Read Mores—the one on the left has two stories and the one on the right has one story.
Beneath that, I’ve got what is supposed to be a subdivision of the two non-sidebar columns into three narrower columns that is supposed to be for displaying letters to the editor. The code, which I’m following from a template, calls for one letter in each of these three columns.
The problem is that with letters to the editor there is no fixed length—some people blather on forever and some have just two sentences. Which, if you just put one letter in each column does two things—first, it looks like the dogs breakfast, with one excessively long letter, and then a tiny little letter with a huge quantum of white space, and then a third somewhere in between it’s all ragged. Second, it means the user ends up scrolling forever to get to the bottom of the lengthy letter, when there’s all this extraneous white space in the two adjacent columns. (I should have said it does three things, because if there is enough white space, the following text, which is supposed to span across all three columns, instead jumps up into the empty column space to fill the void.
What I want to make it do is have a more or less fixed length for each column, have expression engines call for letter number 1, and have that entry go for however long it takes up to the bottom of the column, then wrap over to the adjacent column and continue until it gets to the end of that, then wrap to the third if necessary. Whenever the first entry is done, I want Expression Engines to call for the next letter and display that one immediately after the first, and then the next, and so forth, until all three columns are filled up. In essence, it would look like the lay-out on a print newspaper.
That means, for one thing, that I can’t just tell it to use a fixed limit of letter—if they’re all short, it could take seven or eight. If they’re long, it might just take one or two.
Can anyone help me with how this is done? And also, is there a way to direct letters or stories to appear in an order that is different from the order in which they were entered into the system? (I realize I could hard code each story into whatever position I want it, but then I’d be rewriting all the templates on a daily basis. What I’m thinking of is some way to classify the stories/letters as, e.g., a featured story, then a secondary story, etc., but then have the featured story automatically drop down to being a secondary story after it has been published in the lead position for 24 hours or so….)
Moved to HowTo by Moderator
