Geeklog Forums

I want to have my main page with only two columns. I don't want the left, middle, right block layout. I want to get each of the columns of equal width and they would both have many rows. The top-left row would be the featured story block, and the rest would be blocks I made. Basically I just want the front page to be a page of blocks with links, but I want the featured story block to be in the top left of the page, with the left blocks then underneath the featured story block and the right blocks to the right side of it.

My question is, how do I move the featured story blocK? I have been messing around with the template files but I can't get it to display above the left blocks. Does anybody know how I would go about this? I'm a newbie to PHP and GeekLog and haven't been able to figure it out myself yet. Thanks in advance for any help.

you cant put the featured story in the same column as the left blocks technically speaking. you have to move the left blocks to the rightside either in admin/blocks or in the 1.3.10 config file.

still wont solve your problem. here are a couple of ideas:
1. once you have moved your left blocks into the right column, create a staticpage set as a centerblock that displays underneath your featured article. that static page will be the equivalent of a block and you can load it up with your links. this will only suit you if you can have more than one static page as a centerblock on the main page and i don't know if you can or not.
2. an easier way would be to use CSS and position your featured story block absolutely. and again using CSS, position your left column underneath the story block using absolute positions. the problem here is that you featured story changes its size from story to story so you would have to deal with that, which is possible but often messy.

just off the top of my head at 2 in the morning

Thanks for the tips. I moved over all of the blocks to the right and that got the featured story section in the top left. I also got a static page to display under that block.

Now my question is, can I display a block within a page? I am making this site for the board of education for a small town in Japan. Each block will be links to a specific section of the BOE. For example, one block would be entitled "High Schools" and then below that there would be links to the relative information. I also want to keep some of the GL blocks, such as the upcoming events block, on the main page. Because I want to make the a two column layout, I need to put the blocks into a static page. Can this be done? Can I just call the block within the static page? Oh, and I was able to make two static pages display on the main index page without a problem.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I figured it out. All I had to do was add the following code to the static page and it worked great:

$display .= COM_printUpcomingEvents($help, $title);
return $display;

Now with static pages, I can return blocks within them and put them wherever I want on my page. I'm glad I finally got this working the way I want. Thanks for the help.