Thread

Hi all. Relative novice to EE so please bear with me.

I’m trying to accomplish this:

1. On a homepage, have a list of entry headlines that are color coded according to category.
2. Each entry headline will have a class attached to it which dictates it’s size relative to the others. Ideally this would be tied to date so more recent entries would be physically larger than less recent ones.
3. However, I’d like to be able to sequence the order in a non-linear fashion. In other words, the first entry on the list might be smaller because it’s less recent than the fourth entry which might be larger because it’s the most recent entry.

The effect is similar to a “tag cloud” except the larger item is more recent.

I don’t mind if there’s some manual work to be done here as there will only be a set number of headlines to worry about (around 7) but I’m having difficulty figuring out the best conceptual approach between statuses, categories and/or add-ons like Low Reorder.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

So ordering by date isnt an option?

I’m not sure how I’d order by date in a nonlinear fashion.

So if there are, say, 5 entries with 1 being the most recent, I’d want to be able to order this way

5
4
1
2
3

for example. And then tie that to a class so that the “1” (most recent entry) would be physically larger than the “5” entry. I hope this is making sense.

Thanks very much for the reply.

If the ordering is really arbirtrary, then Low Reorder will be your best bet.

For the class I’d look into some calculations of entry_date vs. current time.

thanks for the reply.
i could theoretically fix the order as there will be a set number of entries on that page.
will look into calculation.

any chance you could elaborate on the entry_date vs. current time idea? don’t mean to impose on your time but as i mentioned, i’m relatively new to this. if it’s too involved, no worries. thanks again.

Oh - just a thought that each entry is time-stamped with entry_date, and possibly you could do a date comparison to figure out the relative age of each entry and use that to apply a class.

if i were to do it manually, would this seem (inefficient but) feasible?

set color by category

set size by status

use low-reorder to determine positioning in the list

every time a new entry was made, it would require the admin to manually cascade the statuses of the last five entries but this would theoretically work, yes?

It would.

You could also create a “color” field, and a “size” field.  And, for that matter, a sort field.

re: the date entry idea - sounds smart and also beyond me. 😊

had thought of the custom fields but thought the low reorder visual model would actually work better for the guy who’s going to be using it day to day. color field might be a better idea than linking to category as well in case he decides to decouple color and category.