Hi all,
This came up because I have a site that has two columns of "latest news" in one of its (many) design variations. The two column layout was a late change, and hadn't been considered when the parse file, which is also used for another site, was built - as a result of which, the two columns live in separate div statements within the parse file itself. Changing that would require redoing maybe 12 design customisations and 50 or so assets, which wasn't in the time budget…
So I was faced with the dilemma of grabbing news items from a single location, where there might be 8 or 12 assets, placed haphazardly by the multiple cms users who create them, and creating two separate asset listings, the first of which grabbed the three most recently published assets, and the second of which grabbed the fourth, fifth and sixth most recently published assets.
Without the design constraint mentioned above, obviously I would simply have created an asset listing of six assets and put them in columns. But this isn't possible.
So the only way I could think to do this was to create the first one as normal, as a three asset listing of the most recently published assets, and the second one as a six asset listing of the most recently published assets, with null position formats for the first three assets.
So this works, but seems kind of clunky.
How would other Matricisers approach this problem? Is there something very simple I'm missing?
Version is 3.20.2, by the way, just in case this is addressed in later versions…
This sounds like presentation to me, so I'd do this purely in CSS:
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=27f87
http://www.zenelements.com/blog/css3-multiple-columns/ (CSS3)
Hi Dan,
I agree that ordinarily, this would be purely a presentation matter - organise into columns, apply css and you're done.
But in this case, the fact the parse file already has the two column divs in place (in the other design variations, each column has different content) prevents me from simply applying css and showing two columns from the same asset listing - although this will be the long-term solution, once I have the time to go back and rebuild that part of the parse file and redo the associated content for the other sites.
But the question was more about the general case than my specific case.
For example, let's say you have a folder of news items, and you want to display two asset listings for them in different parts of the site - I can think of a case where you might want the "latest" news on the home page of a site and "other" news on a secondary page - so you want an asset listing that shows all the news stories that don't appear on the front page.
Other than physically organising them into two different folders in Matrix - which mightn't be ideal from a workflow perspective - is there any way of achieving this logic: "Show all assets from this folder except for the first three in the specified sort order"?
[quote]
This sounds like presentation to me, so I'd do this purely in CSS:
http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=27f87
http://www.zenelements.com/blog/css3-multiple-columns/ (CSS3)
[/quote]