Thread

Firstly I’d like to introduce myself, My names Dan and i’m a freelance designer working out of the UK. I specialise in User interface design.

I anticipate that I am going to be spending alot of time on these boards over the coming months as I have 2 fairly significant site builds to work on.

The first being my own portfolio which I am considering to power using the expression engine cms. Before I dive in and buy a liscence though Id like to first of all establish whether what I am attempting can actually be done and secondly whether there is a demonstration version of the cms that i can try out?

The bones of my site which is still very much a work in progress can be seen at the following url.

http://testing.studiounkle.com/#

As you can see there the main folio page will be made up of rows of thumbnails as is typically the norm, but each thumbnail has a different treatment and size, plus the fact that the arrngement of thumbnails will be different on the alternate rows.

The projects can also be navigated via the dropdown list within the primary navigation.

If each thumbnail were to have a consistent treatment and size I would imagine this to be relatively strait forward in terms of integrating with the cms but since i have these alternating sizes and patterns of arrangement, what will be the best way of setting this up.

Any guidance or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Best
Dan

Hey Dan -

Welcome to the EE community. 

I didn’t look at the markup, but typically when you have some standard things (ie “thumbnails”) that need different markup applied you can do a couple things:

- Create additional fields that dictate positioning (ie a dropdown with left or right options that get applied as float values”

- Template level conditionals that apply different markup depending on where one item is within the loop (first one gets treated uniquely, then the next 3 a different way, with the following yet another way).

Thanks for the response Boyink.

Since my understanding of php is limited would it be possible to create the solution using only additional fields within ee?

Yes - sorry I wasn’t clear on that.

Everything I said is straight EE fields & code, no PHP knowledge required.

Ok I have my licence now so I guess I need to get stuck in and have a go.

I anticipate this is going to be fairly difficult for me as Im a total beginner at this point.

Hopefully the conditionals won’t be too difficult for me to grasp.

No worries..we’ve got your back.😉

Thanks for the assist, Mike.

laneo10 - is that enough information to get you started?

Hi Sue, I’m started but unfortunately i can’t quite get my head round the issue of having alternate rows and alternate thumbnail styles.

I have watched some video tutorials and so far im guessing that is done using the “switch” to change the thumbnail class.

So I have given the projects class names within the css:

project-1
project-2
project-3
project-4

that should be sufficient to create one row using this code:

<div class=”{switch='project-1|project-2|project-3|project-4'}”>thumbnail</div>

But then i have the issue that some of the thumbnails have a different html structure and also the difficulty of having the alternate rows.

It’s a bit of a puzzle for me and im not sure my brain can handle it?

Am i approaching it the right way? Mike mentioned custom fields how can these be used to change the floats?

Cheers
Dan

Realize that custom fields are ways to inject text into a template that creates a web page.  That text can be content, or it can be HTML.

You can use custom fields to store div classes or float values where they need to be associated with an entry.

You can also use conditionals at the template level to look at the value of a custom field and apply different HTML depending on the value.

Thanks boyink

Do you think doing it via the switch method is not the best way then?

I think I understand how using custom fields you could populate your html elemnt with a class or id but Im still not sure how the conditionals would work?

Do you have any examples of how this would look?

Cheers
Dan

Hey, Dan.

Let’s have you post this in the Community Help forum - this is more of a sales questions section.

I’m sure Mike will be happy to continue helping, as well as other members of our community.