Display content in two columns with fixed height in drupal

Question

I'm in need of some pointing in the right direction here...

I have a site with a couple of different content types. I want to display this content in a book-like layout. The book should be of a fixed width and height and the pages should be populated with as many nodes as can fit. It should be in two columns, with the left column being filled before the right one.

How should i approach this?

I have been thinking about a few solutions, don't know which are possible and which one is best or which i can combine.

1. I could just create a view that selects more nodes than is need. Then check how long the nodes is in the theming layer and throw away the nodes that aren't needed. Pagers need to be fixed too.

2. Use panels in combination with views to display one view in two columns, if this is possible. Need a way to determine the amount of nodes that is displayed on each page, based on content length.

3. Write a plugin/handler for views so that i can select an amount of nodes that has an maximum, predetermined, max content length.

4. Write a new display-style for views that shows content in two columns with fixed heights.

5. Write a custom module, leave views and panels out of it and do everything myself with db_queries.

Would appreciate and guidance a lot. Not looking for a finished solution, i'm not afraid to code and i will contribute back if i create something that someone else can use (like a views plugin). Just need someone to guide me in the right direction :)

Answer 1

The hardest thing will be to figure out how much content you need to fill out the space. There's not really a good way to do that either since, it will depend on both the markup and the styles.

The best solution I can think of is loading the nodes with javascript, or maybe just have them available as javascript variables. That way you could insert the nodes to your page one by one. You could then in the JS see the heights of all the nodes in total, and once that height is bigger than x, you only need to remove the last inserted node.

It's not a perfect solution, but I think you should look at doing this with JavaScript. The only problem is, that it wont degrade gracefully very well.

Answer 2

Drupal help you build fast, and it looks like promising but fails to fullfil the needs of client, designer also programmer. You need to write one module page, and some functions.

5th solution you gave has little trouble than others. Write a function that to have "teaser like" behavior, I will return formatted node according to its type. Don't lay on drupal's teaser system. If teasers will have different heights, add height to teaser function.

Answer 3

I don't have a direct answer, but have a few things for you to think about.

It sounds to me like what you are looking for is a combination of a CSS3 Multicolumn Layout (see http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html for example) and limiting the displayed content to a fixed height.

My first thought would be to create a single view that gets more than you need, display it using CSS3 columns, and set overflow: hidden; for the container, so that the extra text is just hidden.

If you need to get more particular, you may need to dig in to the views rendering system to limit the total number of nodes based on how many characters have been rendered.

But since your desired constraint is more visual than data-oriented, I think that the most practical approach will be to use javascript to detect the text height and state of overflow.

There are some things that are unclear about your requirements. What is the purpose of the 2 content types? Does one display on the left and the other on the right? Or are these just 2 different content types that should behave the same way, but we're only seeing one content type at a time on a given page? What should happen with the overflowed content? Should it appear dynamically on page 2, then 3, then 4, and so on?

One parting thought: Maybe load ALL the content that you want to page through, directly to the browser. Maybe have it start off hidden. Then use javascript to display it, formatted into columns, and use javascript to handle the paging as well.