By wahwah on

Hello.

I was looking at the Drupal themes on the various sites that exist for that purpose. I was looking for a theme that doesn't list the last 10 or so posts (stories, book entries, whatever), but sort of puts them together in an interesting manner. Simply put, I want the home page to be not a linear list of last 10 or 15 posts, but divided into specific areas where information of different kinds is categorised into its own groups. So all book pages come together in one part of the page, all blog entries are seen together in another part of the same page, and so on.

In wordpress, it could perhaps be compared to the Hemingway theme:

http://www.warpspire.com/hemingway_example/
http://playwith.wpthemes.info/

I have found the Summary module, but I am not sure if it can do what I want. Still, I will be looking at it closely. Does anyone know any theme that can do this? That would make life a lot simpler!

Thanks

ninad

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x

Comments

BlackSash’s picture

BlackSash commented

At the site in my signature: (It's in Dutch though... So don't expect good reading ;) ) each of the bottom blocks you see, as well as the top-right one, has different dynamic content in it. The top-right one shows recent news articles, the bottom ones each show different items from one of 3 categories. This is done (in this case, since I use 4.7) by adding a couple of custom-designed modules that spit out blocks, ready to be put in the content section of the page. They basically select entries based on a couple of taxonomy terms and sort them. This can be modified/extended to include different node types or other node properties.

Since you're using 4.6 it seems (at least, that's what this question is categorized under), you'll need the dashboard module I think to allow blocks in your content section, but other that that, this same approach should work fine.

The module I use is not really ready for redistribution (It lacks, say, a form for input, for instance), but it was a really great tutorial on PHP for me, so perhaps you'll feel the same way.

As for themes: any theme can do this, since it's not a theme feature, but a module one. With the proper module you can make all sorts of wizardry happen, regardless of the theme used. My theme is of course custom designed and built, but a default one would perform just as well.

All in all the answer lies in finding or creating a good module for fishing out data and creating the blocks needed to display it.

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wmostrey’s picture

wmostrey commented

You could do that with any theme. All you need is a little php knowledge. You could for instance create a new node of the 'page' type, and use some of the following PHP page snippets, like

Display (x) nodes from a multiple categories
Display a list of (x) most recent weblog entries
Display a list of (x) node titles of a specific type

Like this, you can arrange all items just the way you want, not limited to displaying lists of categories, but you could post images, user comments, ..

Good luck!

wahwah’s picture

wahwah commented

Dashboard and PHP snippets together ar working great, and finally my site could become what I wanted it to be like! Thanks guys!

I found an excellent snippet at http://drupal.org/node/37427 but have a small request for a minor modification (as I am not really PHP literate, and work in the copy paste method). Please check my request comment there!

http://drupal.org/node/37427

Thanks!

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