Head hurts. Insert own witty title here.

September 1, 2009 8:39 PM

LessSuckyThanMeAtJoomlaFilter: I'm newish to Joomla and building a website that's going to have on its front page (amongst other things) a section highlighting three services offered, in three side-by-side boxes in the main column, each with a "more" link hopping via anchor link to a corresponding heading on a "Services" page listing all services offered. To more experienced developers than I, how would you achieve this? Three articles in a "position"? A ul in a single article (not really possible if I want to use h3s in each and remain w3c-compliant)? Something else?

Trying to figure out the generally accepted best way to do this, in a way that's intuitive enough for someone non-techie to update it later, doesn't break web standards with crap markup, and gives me Large Amounts Of Sweet Control of how it looks (via stylesheets). Anyone have a thought or two on how best to approach?

posted by springbound to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Display: block wrapper (covering all 3 divs,) display: block with width and height float left classed inner divs. If it doesn't work in IE, check your margins or nix a little bit of width.
posted by shownomercy at 9:01 PM on September 1

Thanks shownomercy but I mustn't've been very clear, sorry. I've got no problems with HTML and CSS; it's Joomla articles/modules/sections/categories etc etc that I'm unfamiliar with and trying to work out how to put CSS into in a way that works.
posted by springbound at 9:10 PM on September 1

You can control in the parameters menu when you edit/create a menu button how the contents are displayed when that button is pressed. If you go to edit Home there are options for number of columns, number of leading entries and so forth. If you set leading as 1 (it will display fullwidth) and then have columns set to 3, and Intro set to 3, to display the intro section only of the three content items you are talking about, the read more button will then put you through to display the rest (you know how there's the two content panels in a create content item page? Just put everything you want after clicking Read More in the second panel.
You may have to make sure parameters of the three content items have Intro selected as displayed, but will probably be that way by default. Just another place to look if something isn't working.

It's basically very easily doable, but if this description doesn't help, I can try again.
posted by opsin at 5:20 AM on September 2

Oh, I just reread, and wanting to use anchors to have them go through to the same page... To make the three columns of it show up... You'd have to use three seperate content items for it, but then could push them all through to the same one using anchors. Either set up the links in HTML, or set up the anchor for a link on the same page, then switch the code to the other page so it will work. But to have all three columns showing a different bit of intro text you'd have to use three seperate intro texts in content items.
As I say you can make all the links go through to a single services page with an anchor to point you to the right section, using the above layout to get the columns.
posted by opsin at 5:23 AM on September 2

opsin, thanks heaps for that. I talked to a co-worker who was able to advise me on the way he'd like it to be done and got a whole different possible solution there but yours was great: it's (probably quite evidently!) structuring stuff in layouts other than single-column ones that I've been needing to work out how to conceptualize, and your explanation helped lots towards that end! You're a star - thanks!
posted by springbound at 3:48 PM on September 3