Create custom layout for views node

Posted by samchok on September 24, 2009 at 7:33am

Hi,
I have created a simple custom content type with the following field:

Title
Body
Image (automatically resized in big and miniature formats with ImageField+ImageCache)

Now I need to display all those fields into a node with a layout as in the following image:
http://77.43.62.178/municipi/node_layout.jpg

Title of the node (News page)
Description of the node
Big image, title, and first few lines of the latest news (News 0)
Miniature image, title, and first few words of latest 8 news

My question is: how can I create such a layout?!
I've never used views module, but I suppose I should create two different views to extract separately the latest news (News 0) and the latest 8 news. Then I should play a little bit with CSS to style them as in the example image. Finally I should add those two views inside a single page (with Panels module? or what else?).
Are there other (easier) ways to obtain that layout? And can you briefly suggest me the steps I should follow?

Another question is: is teaser necessary? Should I let my users fill also the teaser field during news creation (I prefer to avoid it)? Or is it possible (with views, for example) to extract just the first few words from a text field?

Thank you very much.

Comments

You could use one view to get

Posted by adam_b on September 24, 2009 at 3:21pm

You could use one view to get both the latest 1 and the latest 8 news nodes:
- make them as separate displays within the view - eg two blocks with different names and layouts
- make the "latest 8" one increment from 2 (so it doesn't duplicate the first one)

You'll need some manipulation to get the two image sizes - probably imagefield/imagecache/imageapi

There are several ways to get the layout:
- Panels is an obvious choice
- You could use a node and place the "latest 1" in the Content-top region and "latest 8" in the Content-bottom region
- Many other possibilities with themeing etc which other people can give better info on...

Drupal will create a teaser by default with the first X characters from the body field. You can select the field "node: teaser" to display this in your view.

Thank you adam for your

Posted by samchok on September 26, 2009 at 2:19pm

Thank you adam for your helpful suggestions,
I will try in the next weeks, I'll be there asking for more explanation if needed (hopefully not).

_

Posted by WorldFallz on September 26, 2009 at 7:35pm

Probably the easiest way to do it is using an 'attachment' views display. Make a page view of the top part of your design, then add an 'attachment' display to that view with a grid layout for the bottom part.

Another way to do it would be to use the views_attach module and simply attach the grid view to the bottom of the node-- but then it will appear on very node of that content type rather then at a specific url you specify in a page view.

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I created a page display with

Posted by samchok on November 5, 2009 at 10:00am

I created a page display with just one result, and then an attachment display with 8 results in a grid layout: it works very well.
Views module is not so difficult as it seemed to be... ;-)
Thank you very much for your support and suggestion!