Making columns in pages?

See this article for some ideas.

Thanks vtxyzzy
But this is even more unruly! The settings would really baffling to most people! I found it also really hard to get it to look really good! Also there is a problem that it is not updated for 3.0.4, so I’m not sure if am getting all the benefits of the plugin!

I am really most interested in being able to make a page template to allow uneven or independently sized columns. It seems from everything I’ve looked into so far not be at all easy thing to add to a blog from template up. Page Columnist is so far the most successful for this but it means manually setting the columns on every page!

I can see this going to be a bit of a headache!

I shall investigate further.

Thanks again VM

Hi there,
I am the owner of the blog mentioned by vtxyzzy. May I ask what settings” would really baffling to most people”?
If you want to make templates like that, best go with a premium theme framework.
Or, you can take the hard way and make a page template for every different width page you need. Just make the div names unique and add custom CSS.

I would like to be able to offer my clients an easy way to create two column pages without having to deal with the code.

Well, do you mean whole page(including content and sidebar) needs to be of different width or you need 2 column inside article body.

Hi Ishan
What I need is to have pages that can be made with independently controllable column widths in the content area only. For example I am trying to help a client who wants to place, in the content part of his pages, a left column with say 20% width for the explanatory text and a right column with the 80% remainder for an image to illustrate the descriptor text. You can do this with page columnist, but it means doing it on every page individually.

Now the point for this client is that as an architect he wants to show all his projects, with say 3 or 4 pages per project and each page shown on its own, with a page number link below each page article linking it to the next page of the projects.

So the structure goes like this:
Main link “projects”
sub page 1: “project 1 – page 1, 2, 3 etc.
sub page 2: “project 2 – page 1, 2, 3 etc.

and so on all with the same structure visually but showing only within the projects page and not added to the menu at all.

Now much of this is easy to do, with a little tweaking, but making the variable two column pages confuses the client (not very experienced in this kind of work) and I was hoping to find a catch all solution to make the process as easy as possible.

Your plugin as good as it is, requires a certain amount of technical knowledge even at the level of syntax. And I think it complicates the process because it makes the user deal with the concept of tables rather than simply marking a portion of content as belonging to a say left column and giving it a numeric value for the width! Now there are plugins that help even a novice achieve column sets in their posts and pages, but aside from the rather complicated two step process of Page Columnist I have not found one column making plugin that allows you to control the two parameters of column numbers and widths independently in one easy to understand interface. Ideally what you need is to set two separate parameters of number of columns and the width of each as simply as you can determine the text format.

[ so what I mean in as small a nutshell as I can stuff it into is:
he writes his text. selects a section and gives it the command to be column 1, then puts an image in column 2 and so on, then writes 20% as the value for the first and 80% for column 2, hits update and he’s got the layout he needs.]

Your plugin is brilliant for doing advanced layout in the text and so on, but it does not provide for this function.

Thanks for the reply VM

That is not my plugin. I just reviewed the two plugins. Now, above thing is not that hard to do using a little bit of code. Instead of looking for a plugin, I suggest giving your client this template of code:

<div style = "width: 80%; float: left;">Content Column</div>
<div style = "width: 20%; float: right;">Pics</div>

And client does not even need to know much HTML. Just write things as normal after that place the images. Now, go and place following code before article start:
<div style = "width: 80%; float: left;">
Now, go to start of images and post this code:

</div>
<div style = "width: 20%; float: right;">

At the end of article, place </div>
This will take some switching between HTML and WYSIWYG Editor but gets job done faster than any plugin!

And of course this is just a template that you can forward to client. If he wants 70-30, he can just replace the values!

Thanks a lot Ishan

I think this will help him a lot and me for that matter. One question though how do you write the code for making the gap between the two columns?

Well, just edit the width values. Out of above columns, wider one is aligned to left ( by float: left; property) and narrow one to right(again, notice float: right;).
So, if you give widths 75% and 20% respectively, this automatically places 5% gap between them!
Between, I am thinking about developing a plugin for this. This will not be that tough and is perfect as my first plugin!

Thanks a lot. I look forward to your plugin! it would make life a lot easier than most plugins for laying out pages and using the space efficiently.
VM