I really like the simplicity and elegance Nancy's solution! Will certainly add this to my bag of tricks.... Thanks!
If you need the additional flexibility, You could also create view that will only ever return 4 nodes to populate the bottom region and css float them all . Extra fields or taxonomy terms to control selection and order.
Dave
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From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Ms. Nancy Wichmann Sent: Monday, January 30, 2012 9:03 AM To: support@drupal.org Subject: Re: [support] Custom Home Page
Something a lot of people fail to notice is that the Content area is a region; you can place blocks there. If that's not enough, many themes already have a Content Top and Content Bottom region; if your theme doesn't creating a sub-theme with those regions is not hard.
I had a similar column issue with one of my customers. In this case it was at the bottom of the home page. So I stuck the three blocks into Content bottom and used CSS to float them so they ended up next to each other rather than stacked vertically.
Nancy
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
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From: Fred Jones
I have a new D7 site with a unique home page--I am migrating the entire site from static HTML. There is a top part which will be a View, and then four columns below. One of those is a View, but the other three aren't. They are static content but the client of course wants to be able to edit them easily. One has Title, Text, Image, Video and the other two have Title, Text, Image, Link So between them there's only 5 unique fields really. The layout is specialized, so if they can just edit those, I can do the rest. So I have a few questions: 1. My guess is that using Panels is overkill and I could just custom code a display for the home page. They have no plans to adjust anything beyond the content. Makes sense? 2. To let them edit the content I could either make a special content type and then have a field to assign one to column 1,2,3, but then maybe they will create two nodes for col 1. So I suppose I could setup a Rule that if they create a node and assign to a column that already has a node, then the rule will unset the existing node of that column. Then they could keep the old ones around. Or I could unpublish the existing node.