Two Column Views Arguments (Summary View List)

I spent about an hour searching for this. I couldn't find anything solid so I came up with an option myself. This is for people who have long Summary View List. For example, I have a summary view list of up to 130 taxonomy terms depending if there is any content in them.

This is dynamic, so if you have 10 or 100 it will always split the column in 2 with half on one side and half on the other with the remainder on the left.

Example;

[1] | [4]
[2] | [5]
[3] |

I wanted the list to be two column and since they show up as just <li> there was some stuff to add to the template before the css would work. Its not the cleanest but it validates as XHTML and works with any number of items. I set this to only turn into columns if there are 20 or more items in the list. That way there would be at least 10 and 10 on each side.

First, create a view summary theme file. I created views-view-summary.tpl.php and put it in my theme folder. I imagine you could make this file specific to each view if you didn't want two column layout on every view summary.

<?php
// $Id: views-view-summary.tpl.php,v 1.6 2009/01/07 19:21:34 merlinofchaos Exp $
/**
 * @file views-view-summary.tpl.php
 * Default simple view template to display a list of summary lines
 *
 * @ingroup views_templates
 */
?>
<div class="item-list">
  <ul class="views-summary">
  
  <?php
  $totalrows = count($rows); // Counts No. of Rows
  $half = round($totalrows / 2); // Split rows into 2 for two column
  $rownumber = 0; // Sets first row number
  ?>
  
  <?php foreach ($rows as $row): ?>
    
	<?php   
	
	/* Split the row names into either column 1 or column 2  */
	
	if ($totalrows >= 20): // Set the limit for column split 
	  if ($rownumber < $half) {
	  $listid = views_column_1;
	  } else {
	  $listid = views_column_2;
	  }; endif; ?>
	
	<li class="<?php print $listid; /* print column number*/ ?>"><a href="<?php print $row->url; ?>"><?php print $row->link; ?></a>
      <?php if (!empty($options['count'])): ?>
        (<?php print $row->count?>)
      <?php endif; ?>
    </li>
	
  <?php $rownumber++; /* Incriment row number to the next value */ endforeach; ?>
  </ul>
</div>

Add the css to your style sheet. You might have to make some changes to fit your theme.

.item-list ul li.views_column_1 { 
display:block;
float:left;
width:280px;
}
.item-list ul li.views_column_2 { 
display:block;
}

Even though this validates it probably doesn't work at all on IE 6 so some rules would have to be added if your concerned about that.

Hope this helps.

- Jayson