The consulting or theme list will be a better place to post this question. I'm not a developer - just preempting one telling you that this list is for core Drupal development. :) Do you have any visuals/layouts/wireframes that you could show? Maybe post them to the consulting list. I'm not too clear on what you are trying to achieve, but it sounds like the columns and menus could probably be handled with a combination of blocks and regions in your theme. Mark On 17 Jul 2007, at 16:11, Florian Loretan wrote:

Hi Bryan,

If a maximum of three columns ( menu, submenu, content ) were sufficient (personally I would avoid having four columns for the sake of usability and clarity), you could achieve the design you described using the primary and secondary link blocks, and modifying your theme to display your left sidebar horizontally (every block is a column).

I realize that I'm not answering your question directly, but I hope this helps.

Florian

On 7/17/07, bryan rasmussen < rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com> wrote: Hi,

Not sure if this is the right group to ask this in, but it seemed like the other drupal groups were even less relevant:

a friend of mine recently wanted me to help him do some stuff for his new website. Basically it was clear what he needed was a blogging tool (he has the content managing needs of a normal blogger and the Website desires of a Fortune 500 CEO) one of the things he wants are very specific design requirements that I do not think is implementable in any blogging tool currently.

The display requirements are as follows:

The first page of the site is a single column menu, pages aside from the initial single column start page can have up to four columns:

Column types are:

1 - always menu 2 - documents of a particular type or a submenu 3 - documents of a particular type or a submenu 4. documents of a particular type

so one scenario could be that there are four columns on a single page consisting of

| menu | submenu1 | submenu2 | document considered to be under submenu2 another scenario could be |menu| submenu1| document

or |menu | document|

The content handling requirements are as follows:

1. calendar manipulation - add, delete, read events 2. Forms to send contact email 3. serving of various streaming media 4. easy to maintain without needing to be technical

after quite a bit of work got the display working in xhtml / css but now need a way to maintain this. I have the idea that the data of the documents in the non-menu columns could be gotten just by reading in data from some blog installation on the server. I think the best solution would involve a blogging tool that could output content as just XML and that I could then read to build up the exact display he wants. I figure, given his server restrictions (php, MySQL), that drupal is probably the most likely solution to this.

Any suggestions on things to look at with Drupal to maybe do this? If not drupal other tools suggested in the blogging world?

On 17 Jul 2007, at 18:00, Derek Wright wrote:

On Jul 17, 2007, at 8:50 AM, Mark Hope wrote:

...

I'm not a developer - just preempting one telling you that this list is for core Drupal development. :)

For future reference, that isn't true. This list is for development of any Drupal code, especially code being contributed back into the "upstream" versions of things hosted on drupal.org. But, discussions about contrib code are definitely welcome here.

Sorry, delete 'core' from my sentence. Thanks for the clarification - just trying to point an obvious new user to a more appropriate list.

However, please keep in mind the list is huge now, so people shouldn't use it for random development support questions -- i.e. check the docs and api.drupal.org before you post. Otherwise, if it's about Drupal code (not just core), it belongs here.

I was offering to help out in some way, and suggesting that the solution might be done through configuring existing modules and a bit of theming. Something I might be able to help with. Cheers Mark