By uomeds on

I've got my Drupal up and running nicely, and I'm trying to create a news front page with Views and Panels.

I've created a content type called 'News' in node format and I can now create new stories. Next, I want to set up a Panels page that will automatically show each News story in its own rounded-corners panel, chronologically and ideally with some sort of pagination.

I tried creating a new View called news, but I didn't know what fields to add. Nothing about my 'News' content type was showing up as an option. I just want it to show the title and the body.

Can anyone please help? How do I do this?

Thanks.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

adam_b’s picture

adam_b commented

Views and Panels are excellent modules, but complex to learn.

I'd suggest starting with Views and http://drupal.org/project/simpleviews (which gives a simplified interface). Leave Panels alone until you've got something in Views which has the content you want.

You can also go to YouTube and search for "Drupal Views" - you'll find some useful tutorials.

uomeds’s picture

uomeds commented

Thanks, but I've already got Views and Panels working in other areas of the site and I haven't had any problems with those. My Advanced Profile Kit uses a custom Panel layout I assembled for great user profiles. I have also built a members directory table in Views from field data in my custom user profiles.

I understand how to use these modules in contexts like that. But I've searched and I've searched, but I have yet to see a simple explanation of how to use these to do a news page.

Any help?

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

Next, I want to set up a Panels page that will automatically show each News story in its own rounded-corners panel, chronologically and ideally with some sort of pagination.

This doesn't sound like a good use case for Panels. It sounds like what you really want to do is put a rounded-corner box around each element returned by a single paginated view -- in which case why don't you use the standard "front" view that comes with Drupal, and appropriate CSS/Jquery theming?

uomeds’s picture

uomeds commented

I thought Panels was really popular for news site front pages. I've seen plenty of great designs that implement it how I've described. Not so?

adam_b’s picture

adam_b commented

It is popular, but not because it creates rounded corners - because it allows you to display multiple views in one page. If you have the relevant views already, then you just need to add them to the panels.

But from your description it appears that your view isn't working yet. Have you added fields for Node:Title and Node:Teaser?

uomeds’s picture

uomeds commented

Yes that's the idea.

So far, I have created a new content type, called 'News'. Here is a screenshot. I just added field_news_title as a test now to see how it would show. I don't think I need it or any custom fields, though.
http://uomeds.com/news-content-type.gif

If that's fine basically as is, then regarding my view, here is another screenshot of where I am. I'm not sure how to specify the content type, so it seems to just be spitting out all content node titles and bodies at random.
http://uomeds.com/news-view.gif

Any further direction is appreciated.

(And just to be clear, my objective is not rounded corners. My goal is a flexible, Panels based front page that primarily displays news, but also other content.)

Thanks again.

adam_b’s picture

adam_b commented

No, you don't need custom fields. I was referring to fields in the view, not in the node.

To specify the content type in a view, you need to add Filters: specifically, node-type.

Please look at documentation or a tutorial for Views.