Two columns, but sorted, please

Porting our original content we needed a way to layout some pages in two columns. One example is our partners page (http://contaire.com/partner) where in addition to the two columns we have an introductory text at the top. We quickly settled on the contributed collimator.module but had to patch it to give us control over the way it sorts articles. The collimator offers the standard modes by-date and by-title to sort. We wanted to control sorting explicitly and abused a new node field _teaser_weight_ for this. The _abuse_ here is that actually this field should be a property of the table term_data but there is no easy way to add this without patching the taxonomy.module. We provided our changes as a patch (http://drupal.org/node/15240) to the collimator.module.

The single column text at the page top is simply the description of the page's taxonomy term, fed through Textile.