IfElse redesigned: 3col to 2 col and other experimentations

That is very fancy and the two rh menus seems to work really well. Congratulations.

I’m using the bricks theme which is similar. You can see my site here.

I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to accomplish what you’ve done with the pages. That is, go from 3 columns on the main page to 2 columns in the pages. I can’t figure it out. Can you give me some suggestions?

Your site is GREAT! – by the way…

Thanks.

In for a penny – inspired by ifelse to actually get the thing up and running I have just put Aphrodite on my blog. Final styling in progress.

To go from 3 cols -> 2 cols, I’ve exploit the fact that home.php is higher on the template.

What this means is that you can define a totally different design on your home page from your internal pages. I use it to have a 3 column entry page but there is no reason why you even have to do this. You may want to have a 4 column entry page or even that 2001 feature, the flash splash page:-)

The difficult part is not so much the idea behind it; it’s more to do with the fact that you want to code it in a way that is maintainable and flexible.

It then means that you can do all your last comments / recent post type plugins without disturbing your index.php for the 2 col layout. Plus you avoid a lot of if / else (with due respect) php type hackage in your templates.

So, are you saying you started out with a 2 column theme and redesigned the home.php or the index.php to show 3 columns?

The bricks theme is 3 column all the way through. I’ve been trying to incorporate an alternate page, but I can’t get it to work.

Well I started with a hacked up 3 col template and saved it as home.php.

So, can the theme you’re using be downloaded? Maybe I should just start with one that’s already doing what I want it to do and tweak from there!

Well there seems to be a bit of borkage in IE at the moment. I would like to call it live testing.

So, are you saying you started out with a 2 column theme and redesigned the home.php or the index.php to show 3 columns?
When I was experimenting, I basically hacked up a two column theme into a 3 column one.

However, when it came to doing things correctly, I broke up my work into two distinct phases. In the design phase, I started from scratch, and designed a 3 column theme based on CSS floats. No presentational style to speak of at this stage; In fact, it was butt ugly with the most garish colours you could conjour up. I do this because it’s easier to see where each component lies. This would be the home.php

From this I transformed this layout into a 2 column one (fairly easy as I’d always had this in mind). This is used outside of the entry page. It is only then, that I styled up the elements i.e. fonts, backgrounds, colours etc…
The other phase is the code phase. This is where I had to think about how things would be glued together and how I would do things such as the shorts, latest features and older posts. I had to make sure that as far as I could, I wasn’t duplicating unneccessary work across pages.

The bad (good?) news was that I wrote it from the ground up and not from an existing theme. Whether you do the same is a judgement call on your part.

Something else I am doing is using the template switch to import additional CSS to overide the home CSS. That gives us bg and style swiching between pages or views.

You can also use the is_home() conditional switch to detect if you’re on the home page.

I’m a “Tweaker” – not a “Designer”. Ya’ll are talking GREEK to me.

I’m very interested in the styles that are being used. I think it’s very innovative, functional and provides more information for the reader on the home page.

I guess I’ll just LURK until it’s perfected and then INSTALL!

Thanks for your work….

ifelse – thinking of the end user and ease of developing further styles my choice is to avoid conditionals where possible. Just my way.

my choice is to avoid conditionals where possible
I fully agree. I only use it once to retrieve a different background image. The design functions equally well without the conditional though.