By yonation on

hey all,

thanks for helping a drupal noob - i'm coming over from the joomla side and, even with a few problems, am finding drupal so much more intuitive and interesting to use.

my question (appears) to be quite simple: i have a region on my front page, Front Page Splash, where I want to display an image.

I have downloaded and installed image module, uploaded my image, tried to attach it to a page, but i just cannot make it load in that region.. How do i turn an image into a node (which then can be attached to a block, which can be placed in a region, no?)... Or, how do I make anything into a block? Am I gettting confused somehow?

Any help, and larger suggestions on the relationship between blocks and pages (ie, can i display any page in any block on any specific page?) would be tremendously helpful.

thanks.
yonation

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

yonation’s picture

yonation commented

i should mention that i have Views 2 installed. I also tried to make a filter block from views with type: image . this didn't find the image that i had clearly uploaded, and that was available as content type Image, through Views.

thanks again!

notarealperson’s picture

notarealperson commented

Try using CCK + Imagefield. It will be easier to integrate into a views block that will display your image.

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Is your front page a page, or is your front page a view? Or perhaps it's a Panels page. Very different answers apply in each situation.

Does the picture change frequently (i.e., is it content) or is it an unchanging part of the design?

yonation’s picture

yonation commented

its the basic page.php template, checking to see if certain blocks exist. therefore, i check to see if front_image has content, and if it does, i'd like to print it. for the moment it doesn't matter if its random or not. it seems like views 2 cannot retrieve images like views 1, is this correct? i'm really clawing my eyes out here. the picture is content; otherwise i could hardcode it but i'd like to separate the markup from content

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

you'll need to do a bit of reading, but here's the basic idea:

go to views, enable the 'frontpage' view (it's already in there)

enable nodequeue module, set up to support some content type (create, perhaps, a new 'frontpage items' content type - important: in this content type, insert an imagefield with imagefield cck and use imagecache module if you want controlled image sizes (presets) to automagically resize the pics

now go back to that views frontpage and have it display the nodequeue - and in the presentation select a table view and in the fields area select *only* the imagefield that you've added (do not leave title, remove everything else)

if you do this correctly, your front page will now show just the images you want as they are added and removed from the nodequeu - i'm using views slideshow to do some nifty animations of these very images so homepage rotates through changing image sets week to week or when i feel like clicking the "add to nodequeue" button on some new image/content

...that's one way to do it...imagefield is soo much more flexible than image module - it's about images as nodes (image module) or images as a fields within a node (imagefield cck)...fields are easier to manipulate with views (in my experience) than repurposing an entire node

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i love to waste time: http://twitter.com/passingnotes

yonation’s picture

yonation commented

thanks for the imagefield advice guys (and girls)! thats exactly what i wasn't understanding, why i couldn't repurpose an image as a node - the imagefield field allowed me to set up a filter.

i'm still not exactly sure how frontpge works differently than other things, and how i can have a separate css structure for it, but i guess i'll have to plow through that one?

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

some users have difficulty creating a custom frontpage and understanding what happens when a specific node is set to be frontpage - the frontpage view simply (when enabled) provides a way to customize a view of the front page - for example, you may promote all content type 'story' to the front page, but perhaps want to show it in a table or list and remove certain fields and so on, and using views:frontpage makes this a snap (to let only certain content types flow through to front page, or apply unique filters like only most recent, most popular, most commented or whatever you want to do that a view will allow you to do - in my case, i'm using views slideshow and all it does is show images, no titles, just a slideshow of pictures because i didn't want to have to deal with all of those node carousel and other slideshow modules for something this straightforward!

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i love to waste time: http://twitter.com/passingnotes

yonation’s picture

yonation commented

zilla,
you've been very helpful, and i understand the frontpage view in one way - but.. I cannot use it to structure my DIVs separately for the frontpage, right? for that, i need to create a different tpl.php page that has the three column, splash image, etc right? because i want the layout to be totally different for the frontpage.

does that make sense? is there an easier way? i'm thinking 2 templates, one for the rest of the site, one for the front page, and they have different blocks etc. then through blocks i can drag nodes to the particular region set up for that particular template, right? or am i over complicating things?

thanks again so much, your answers are very clear and views slideshow kicks major ass!

zilla’s picture

zilla commented

yes, you're going to want to check out this idea:

create a new content type called myfrontpage - it will likely have only ONE node: your frontpage (though maybe you could use it to house about, contactus, team, etc type pages)

go to admin/site configuration/site information (i think it's that one) and set your frontpage to be the node that you've created (quickly create the node after creating the content type and give it a title like frontpage supernode and a dummy body text (it will all be replaced)

now, go download and enable the "composite layout" module for d6 - it's like "panels lite" but for just *one* node (as opposed to styling all of whatever, this is for just one node that needs a special layout, or one at a time while doing stuff - it has a three column option and several others)

in that layout, you can put blocks, nodes, etc - just like panels actually, but without headaches and since panels ain't totall ready (and kinda overkill for your one page need), composite layout will be a huge timesaver

now once you've got it set up like what you want (putting whatever whereever, blocks, views blocks, node content or references in blocks and so on), create a custom tpl for just that one node (again, this is why we create the content type for just the one page that you want special styling for) - now style that one node-frontpage.tpl as desired

you do not have to use composite layout, but it's really nice - holds blocks, and blocks can hold views and other nodes and so on, so simplifies rapid homepage design - and making a single page content type for just this one item makes design management a snap

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i love to waste time: http://twitter.com/passingnotes

Jabzebedwa’s picture

Jabzebedwa commented

Zilla, your explanation about how to do a custom frontpage just helped me out A LOT!

Many thanks,

Ben
www.uvita.biz

Flying Drupalist’s picture

Flying Drupalist commented

What? All of the suggestions are ridiculous overkill.

Whatever happened to just < img src="" > in the block? So simple, takes half a second.