Split list view into 2 columns - so close I can taste it!

After nevets' suggestion, I looked at theming the grid to use lists instead of tables so the markup would be semantic.

I realized however that I could just use the same principle I'm trying to use to make the 2 category columns, within the views-view-list.tpl.php file to do exactly what the grid view does, but with lists instead of tables.

In views-view-list.tpl.php, I'm getting a count of all the nodes in the category, splitting it in half and storing this value (call it $half). Then I added a counter into the foreach loop that already exists in the views-view-list.tpl.php file. If the counter equals the $half variable, I'm printing out </ol><ol> tags which effectively creates 2 ordered lists instead of one. Then I just set the start attribute in the 2nd list to the value of the counter. Floating the lists using CSS finishes it off. It looks just like the grid view, but uses ordered lists.

It's still not exactly what I wanted, but it's a good compromise until I figure out how to implement my original idea.

I still haven't been able to achieve the split list as described above, so I'm still open to suggestions!

Kate

It may not be the most elegant solution, but it works and I'm happy with it.

In template.php I used the preprocess_views_view function to get the total number of items (in my case businesses) for my view, split it in half ($half), and was able to get the taxonomy term name (which is ultimately the group title) of the business that was at the halfway point from view->result, since each item has a unique key in the array. I store the taxonomy term as $halfway_point. My view name is "category-list", hence the "__category_list" in the function name.

function theme_preprocess_views_view__category_list(&$variables) {
        $view = $variables['view'];
        $half = ceil(count($view->result) / 2);
        $variables['halfway_point'] = $view->result[$half]->term_data_name;
}

Then in my views-view--category-list.tpl.php file, I added the following to str_replace the group heading with the same name, but with a </div><div> at the beginning of it. I had to include some of the view template html in the str_replace because the left column should end and the right should begin BEFORE the <div class="item-list"> tag so the html remains in the proper order.

### add the </div><div> in at the
### halfway point to separate the columns
$rows = str_replace("<div class=\"item-list\"><h3>$halfway_point","</div><div id=\"biz_rightcol\"><div class=\"item-list\"><h3>$halfway_point",$rows);

I also made the following change further down in the views-view--category-list.tpl.php file where $rows gets printed out, which sets up the left column:

 <div id="biz_leftcol">
      <?php print $rows; ?>
</div>

I then floated the 2 columns next to each other.