Hi there,
I’m working on my next big thing that you can see in its present form here (smellyfish.net).
As you can see the main page shows the news on a 2 column layout.
The column are made with tables and a nice piece of php I borrowed somewhere in this forum some time ago, nice work indeed.
I was wondering…does anybody has any tip regarding how I could have entries to nicely flow one under the other even if they are somewhat longer than each other?
Just to show the problem I made the first left entry longer than the right top one. You can see the white gap between the top right and the bottom right one.
Thanks for any suggestion.

Ivan

Have you considered using a CSS layout instead of tables?  What you have is a 3 column layout, with one content area that spans the 2 columns on the right.  Plenty to choose from that could be modified with a little effort from Layout Gala.  In these layouts, the content in each column isn’t affected by the content in other columns, so you wouldn’t have any flow issues.

Hi Derek,
there are no doubts that CSS can be used to create the 2 columns layout. God knows that I’ve tried but failed miserably :) I got lost in a sea of Floats and Divs and eventually gave up. This is the best I can produce so far, so I guess I’ll have to live with it because as much as I thought about it I think there’s no way to have a nice flow AND to use tables.
Solution: keep the firsts page posts all short and more or less of the same lenght :’) not elegant but hey… it does the job :)

Ivan

The templates on the link I provided have all of the hard stuff taken care of for you; it’s basically plug and play.  Only thing you’ll need to do is alter the widths, fonts, and background images.  They are premade to be cross-browser compatible and not have any positioning quirks.

Hi Ivan,

I have a couple of ideas for you from both a content and layout perspective.

I have a client right now who has a design with a “fixed” height. I can’t have the content on his right hand column get too long. The way I’m dealing with this is to do an EE word limit. You could do this with your first-page articles. Instead of keepign the articles themselves short, why don’t you put a limit on how many words are displayed? Then put a little link like “click to read more” that takes people to a full post page?

Derek’s suggestion is worth a second look. I know making the transition from tables to css can be painful, but it offers you a lot more flexibility and future capabilitity in the long run. Your sites will load faster, in general, and making changes across the site as a whole take 5 minutes, instead of 5 hours. Indeed, the templates Derek provided are really “plug and chug.” What I do when I am trying to make a new design work and I’m basing it off an existing set of code is to add gradually. Don’t try to input all your content at once. Play around with the templates, add a bit, if it doesn’t break, add some more, etc. That way if your learning curve does cause something to “break,” it’s a lot less stressful and time consuming to pinpoint that.

Thank you both for your answers.

While the Layout Gala link was indeed great I had an hard time trying to adapt the php script to flow the entries between the two columns. I’m mostly a graphic designer than a coder so I can get just that far.

The other suggestion with the word limit is for sure less elegant than a modern css layout but it works as expected and it solved my problem in one shot!
This means that now I can go on with the site and at the same time try to beat the beast and play with the CSS layout.
I *wish* Rick would consider an embedded way to display content in 1-2-3 columns, but for the moment we’ll have to do it in some other ways.

Thanks for your suggestions guys.
Ivan