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[Scott Lavelle Friend Scott LavelleJoin date: November 2010Posts: 266Downloads:16Uploads:5 Thanks: 6 Thanked: 64 times in 27 posts]

#198364

I’m looking for some input from the community of folks who build websites for their clients. One of the benefits we tout as a reason for using Joomla is the ease of changing the content in the back end after the site is handed over to the user.

And for the most part, it’s true, but there are a lot of features that are not obvious or usable, or in some cases, even trainable to our users – especially when it involves going to the code view and changing html: they just don’t/won’t get it.

So, here’s an example of one (using the latest bootstrap 3 based T3 framework). I had a user request that we make some of the content on his pages into two columns. I can do this fairly easily and did. Here’s how I handled it (should be fairly obvious):


<div class="col-md-4">
content here
</div>
<div class="col-md-8">
more content in second column here
</div>


This makes it so that on medium and larger screens, there are two columns and for smaller screens, there’s just one – but of course, you knew that!

There’s simply no way my client will be able to do this. If were just about creating it from scratch, it might be ok, since that won’t happen that often anyway, but even making changes to it in the GUI is going to leave him likely to completely screw up the layout of the page, accidentally deleting an </div> here or a “class=” there…

What are you doing to help your clients for the more advanced displays such as two columns or others like some of the fancy “content animations” that have been introduced in some of the newer templates?

Thoughts?

Scott Lavelle - Technical Resource Solutions, LLC
Certified Joomla Administrator

[fmfame Friend fmfameJoin date: October 2013Posts: 228Downloads:4Uploads:39 Thanks: 8 Thanked: 25 times in 1 posts]

#537569

So,

There are few ways to create custom columns with joomla and/or joomlart templates.

The easiest way is to start with a blog layout and in menu manager set to 2 columns.

Now you can edit css and html and tpls folder files of joomlart template your wishes.

If the clients should be able to change column layouts,
You also could add in joomla everywhere “options” or “custom fields” for example to a 2 column layout (in articles/ in categorys/ menu items — options)
That would be a good plugin you could create and publish for your clients.
Here is a example doc for things like this:
http://docs.joomla.org/Adding_custom_fields_to_the_article_component

And to the fields you can add functions of your own styles, layouts, ..what you think what your clients need.

This is the only way to make it so easy as possible for clients.

I hope i havent missunderstood your post.

[Scott Lavelle Friend Scott LavelleJoin date: November 2010Posts: 266Downloads:16Uploads:5 Thanks: 6 Thanked: 64 times in 27 posts]

#537672

I understand the idea of custom fields (like I’ve used many times in K2 or Zoo), like in my website portfolio, here: http://technicalrs.com/websites/website-portfolio/item/76-mcstatts-printing.html (where the additional info block is to the right) but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

I also understand the idea of multiple columns for a Blog layout, like I’ve used to do a listing of Staff for example – like here: http://www.audiointersection.com/about-us

What I’m talking about is multiple columns of text WITHIN an article where it is just flowing text or blocks of things. Two places you could think of this would be several grouped bulleted feature lists, like


Features 1 Features 2
item item
item item
item item
item item

Features 3 Features 4
item item
item item
item item
item item


(I can’t get that to line up exactly in the forum, but I think you get the idea) – like a table, but without using a table and still having it be responsive like the col-md-4 would do.

Or think of the way newspaper columns work – this would be another layout option that I’d like the client to be able to at least modify without messing up, if not create the layout on their own.

SOME of my clients could figure this out, but MOST of them don’t want to ever see the HTML at all, so it would be great to be able to show them how to do this with the format and style/class dropdowns without going into the code view.

Does that make more sense?

Scott Lavelle - Technical Resource Solutions, LLC
Certified Joomla Administrator

[wingly Friend winglyJoin date: February 2014Posts: 310Downloads:0Uploads:87 Thanks: 80 Thanked: 83 times in 48 posts]

#537693

@slavelle;

What else are you using in your project except T3-framework? And these articles are simple Joomla articles or are articles created by a certain extension?

[fmfame Friend fmfameJoin date: October 2013Posts: 228Downloads:4Uploads:39 Thanks: 8 Thanked: 25 times in 1 posts]

#537729

Hi Slavelle,

For things like this why dont you use an advanced WYSIWYG editor.

Example: JCE editor

Found a cool tutorial for creating 2 columns in an article..

http://www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/how-to-create-a-two-column-layout-in-a-single-joomla-article-the-easy-way-using-jce/

[Scott Lavelle Friend Scott LavelleJoin date: November 2010Posts: 266Downloads:16Uploads:5 Thanks: 6 Thanked: 64 times in 27 posts]

#537736

wingly: every project is different, but for the sake of this post, let’s say I’m just using the latest T3-Framework with a base Joomla install, JCE as the editor, and nothing else special.

fmfame: I’m already using JCE and the tutorial you pointed to requires the use of a few things:
1. The code edit view to insert divs
2. The css style editor which then uses percentages as the formatter, which doesn’t work well for responsive design – I mean, it does in general, but when the screen gets to phone size, you wouldn’t want two columns at 50% width; it would be a mile-long page then. You want it to change to a single column – this is why I keep pointing out the col-md-4 example class in my post: it will cause it to be two columns for screens medium and larger and for small and xs screens, It would be 1 column.

So what I am getting so far from the responses is that there isn’t an easy way to do this. Still looking for ideas as this type of thing has been bugging me for quite some time. Since I “sell” websites to my customers on the premise that it’s easy to edit without having to call me every time, the only way I can keep that statement true is to layout the pages without any of the fancy stuff in favor of making it easy for them to edit.

Scott Lavelle - Technical Resource Solutions, LLC
Certified Joomla Administrator

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