Box placement

Bernard Paquesfrom nearby-an-airport Associate, 8372 posts	on Feb. 23 2009 Hello Ken, and thanks for jumping into the yacs wagon. Page design is still an area to improve, and your questions are important to us. The settings of the home page is similar to what you can do at a section index page, this is how you can create a specific atmosphere at a specific section. Also, you can adapt the theme at a given section, meaning that the index page, and all contained articles, will have a specific look. Look at the four main sections of the site www.zaniroli.com for an example of this powerful feature. In a section index page, as at the home page, the overall layout is as follows: introduction and description (you type what you want to haeve there, maybe with yacs codes) gadget boxes (actually, each box is an article of a sub-section that is configured to be displayed as gadget boxes - order of the boxes is the order of pages in the sub-section) sub-sections (select the layout you want to have) articles (select the layout you want to have) On the side of the page, you have a navigation panel and an extra panel. Usually the content of the navigation panel is fixed across the site, where the content of the extra panel may change at each page. However, the overall distribution of blocks can be changed in one of the configuration panel. For example, you can now select if the user menu should stay in the navigation panel, or if you prefer to move it to the extra panel. Also, dynamic content of the navigation panel is coming from articles in the special section devoted to this usage. Look at the site map. The order of articles in the section is reflected in the navigation panel. Maybe you wonder how to change the order of articles in a section ? By default, yacs lists articles by ranking, and then in reverse chronological order. The default value for the ranking is 10000, but you can change this manually by editing a page. An alternative is to use the Manage content command in a section, to change rankings of several articles at once. I understand that this is a quite bare answer, do not hesitate to ask for more...
Ken Mfrom Raleigh, NC 9 posts	inspired from Bernard Paques on Feb. 24 2009 OK that is helpful, let me ask another question then. Let us say I wanted to change the main panel order, where and how could I do that? For example I am thinking of the order to be as follows: 1. Sub Sections, in a tabbed format 2. Articles 3. Gadget Boxes Or the other option is Articles then Subsections in a decorated format. Are these types of format changes available in theme or section design or configuration? Basically can I get to this type of change without customizing core functionality? Ken "L'enfer c'est Les Autres!" - Jean-Paul Sartre
Bernard Paquesfrom nearby-an-airport Associate, 8372 posts	on Feb. 24 2009 At the moment this is hard coded in yacs, but we could introduce a modular approach similar to the one used for side panels I presume. Would you like to have a similar page organization across all of your site?
Ken Mfrom Raleigh, NC 9 posts	inspired from Bernard Paques on Feb. 24 2009 I would say yes, well optionally yes. It would be nice to order each component and weight/rank them. As it stands I think I can do some of what I am thinking with the use of formatting codes. I will play around with that and see where I get to. With the formatting codes I don't persay need Gadget Boxes if I author the pages correctly. That being said, if something was to be done to make it more module I would suggest a change in the way the skin is done. Seriously, why not this to make a skin, and HTML file and a CSS file. Then in the HTML file you merely place php calls to where you need to gain things, like <$main_panel> <$tabs> Or something like that so a template really is a simple HTML file + CSS that you merely have some "insert" calls placed in to render the YACS content and navigation. Just a thought. I think it would make for a simpler template system. MODX does something like that. Means you really could grab just about any CSS template you want and make it into a MODX template. Something like that for YACS would be a HUGE advantage. Ok so to continue how does that help my placement problem, in the theme I can specify instead of <$main_panel> for example I can specify <$gadgets> <$content> <$sections> and by how I order those three calls in the skin that would sort my order out. Ken "L'enfer c'est Les Autres!" - Jean-Paul Sartre
Bernard Paquesfrom nearby-an-airport Associate, 8372 posts	inspired from Ken M on Feb. 24 2009 Ken M : Actually, yacs themes are based on `template.php` files, which are PHP-based variants of the HTML templates you are talking about. Have a look at any file of this kind below the skins directory to get a clear understanding of this.
Ken Mfrom Raleigh, NC 9 posts	inspired from Bernard Paques on Feb. 25 2009 " Ken M : Actually, yacs themes are based on `template.php` files, which are PHP-based variants of the HTML templates you are talking about. Have a look at any file of this kind below the skins directory to get a clear understanding of this. " Yes but I find the Skins to be overly complicated in some ways. Granted they are well documented. Also they don't offer as much modular placement of content areas as I would like. But heck once I get my conversion done I can deal with this more. I would be happy to contribute. Anyway I have found mostly how to handle this. The model I am working on is as follows. I have multiple News sections, reviews, releases, announcements, etc. I have a couple categories which determine front page placement and my "cover page" utilizes YACS query codes to place the appropriate category listings on the front page. So far that has covered most of what I need. However I have a question. I would like to know how to place a Teaser for one specific article on the front utilizing a similar approach. I tried the article=? code but that just gives me a link to the article. For my catefory listings I have been using published.decorate=category:? but I do need to in certain places do one article. Granted I can always do that manually, it really is not a big deal. I plan on versioning the cover page in an Ezine sort of way. If anyone has some YACS code tips for doing what I have described I would greatly appreciate it. Those YACS codes have been really useful especially for bridging the positional and presentation ideas I have been trying to impliment. Actually to show kind of what I am trying to do, let me direct you to the existing site which is a XOOPS site. www.raleighmusic.com The front page news block is what I am trying to do, teaser, then a list. Granted I am changing it in YACS to go beyond what that does, but it expresses the general idea. Ken "L'enfer c'est Les Autres!" - Jean-Paul Sartre
Bernard Paquesfrom nearby-an-airport Associate, 8372 posts	on Mar. 8 2009 Have you tried the `[article.description=123]` code to include some text instead of getting a link? Also, thanks for your pointer, I believe this will help to create new useful codes.

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