weighting content on front page?

I'm not completely sure whether that's solving your problem but it sounds like what you're looking for is "Sticky at top of lists". You can find it under "Publishing options" in article/story/blog edit mode. Just switch it on for the content you've created and voilà...

HTH,
Marco

You can create a post and set it to sticky/promoted to front or do it in a block - yes, really.

In template.php create a new 'region', by memory with garland you'll need to declare the function also (since Garland is not doing this). phptemplate declares 5 regions by defualt - header, left, right, content and footer - but we want one more - lets call it 'contenttop'.

function garland_regions() {
  return array(
       'header' => t('header'),
       'left' => t('left sidebar'),
       'right' => t('right sidebar'),
       'contenttop' => t('content top'), //the new region
       'content' => t('content'),
       'footer' => t('footer')
  );
}

Now, in your page.tpl.php file you need to print out that region, place the following code directly above <?php print $content; ?> - which in Garland is on line 75.

<?php print $contenttop; ?>

If you only want that region on the homepage you can put it in an 'is front'... I'll leave that as reading task for you:)

Now go and create your block and you will see that you have a the new region to select from the drop list! Great! Using the block visibility settings you can set it to only display on the <front> page, or where ever.

www.sitespring.eu

There are many ways to do this. First to my mind is "panels" module, which is being actively developed and improved into yet another essential website module, to go along with views and cck. By adding nodequeue, you can define specific order of posts in various views (which are custom displays of content) ... and panels will provide you an admin gui to insert various views, blocks, posts and custom content into various css layouts.

Direct code may be more lean and elegant, but if you're not a coder, or are developing for a non-coding client, these modular solutions could potentially assemble what you need without any custom coding at all (aside from the usual theming concerns).

Hope this helps!

Laura
_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
design, snap, blog

I was struggling with the exact same need and I found the views module to be exactly what I needed. After installing it, go to "views" in the administration menu and click "add" next to the "frontpage" view. The "frontpage" view is identical to the default frontpage, but it is far more configurable. Add a header to this view and put whatever html you want there. Save this and then go to "site information" and change the default front page to "frontpage".