Glad to hear that worked. We

JeevesBond — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:48:06 +0000

Glad to hear that worked. We don't mind about the code; I needed to see it to help you.

I'm using Firefox. I meant

Unconscious — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:33:56 +0000

I'm using Firefox. I meant it stretched the page vertically - I'll have a look to see if I can change the columns to 7.

Update: Yes, it worked. I can't believe it was so simple - strange place for the front-page settings to be, though, inside the menu.

Thank you very much.

If your formatting is

JeevesBond — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 01:51:00 +0000

If your formatting is relatively minor, rather than hack your template you could try changing the CSS styles

That was my first thought, but the area which needs to be changed is in a table.

<?php
 mosMainBody(); 
?>

It seems this is the function that's returning the code to the table we need to change.

Scratch that

I've done some digging and apparently if you go into the settings for the frontpage and change the number of columns to 1, then all the news items will appear in one list. Those instructions are for Mambo, but Joomla is a fork of Mambo.

EDIT: Eek, it stretched the page. I hope you don't mind.

Meh, it only stretches it in IE. Not that many people bother with that browser any more 'round here.

Are you using IE6 or IE7?

Hm, yeah, I tried with the

Unconscious — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:33:21 +0000

Hm, yeah, I tried with the Web Developer toolbar the other day - but I think the layout is done with tables, which doesn't constitute as CSS. It's a mixture of HTML and PHP, which makes it very difficult for me to understand.

If your formatting is

decibel.places — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:21:54 +0000

If your formatting is relatively minor, rather than hack your template you could try changing the CSS styles.. I do that all the time for Drupal.

I recommend using Firefox with the Web Developer add on for the "Edit CSS" feature and Firebug to zero in on your selectors.

You could also try selectively commenting out the various sections in the template and see what happens!

I've had a look at that -

Unconscious — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 23:07:29 +0000

I've had a look at that - but it doesn't seem to apply to what's going on for me. All I'm trying to do is reorder a few modules - yet the HTML and CSS of the template aren't exactly clear as to which module is which.

Here, have a look at this.

<?php
defined( '_VALID_MOS' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
// needed to seperate the ISO number from the language file constant _ISO
$iso = explode( '=', _ISO );
// xml prolog
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="'. $iso[1] .'"?' .'>';
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<?php mosShowHead(); ?>
<?php
if ( $my->id ) {
    initEditor();
}
$collspan_offset = ( mosCountModules( 'right' ) + mosCountModules( 'user2' ) ) ? 2 : 1;
//script to determine which div setup for layout to use based on module configuration
$user1 = 0;
$user2 = 0;
$colspan = 0;
$right = 0;
// banner combos

//user1 combos
if ( mosCountModules( 'user1' ) + mosCountModules( 'user2' ) == 2) {
    $user1 = 2;
    $user2 = 2;
    $colspan = 3;
} elseif ( mosCountModules( 'user1' ) == 1 ) {
    $user1 = 1;
    $colspan = 1;
} elseif ( mosCountModules( 'user2' ) == 1 ) {
    $user2 = 1;
    $colspan = 1;
}

//right based combos
if ( mosCountModules( 'right' ) and ( empty( $_REQUEST['task'] ) || $_REQUEST['task'] != 'edit' ) ) {
    $right = 1;
}
?>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; <?php echo _ISO; ?>" />
<link href="<?php echo $mosConfig_live_site;?>/templates/rhuk_solarflare_ii/css/template_css.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>

<div align="center">
	<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="808">
		<tr>
			<td class="outline">
		  		<div id="buttons_outer">
		  		  <div id="buttons_inner">
						<div id="buttons">
						<?php mosLoadModules ( 'user3', -1); ?>
						</div>
					</div>
		  		</div>
		  		<div id="search_outer">
		  		  <div id="search_inner">
		  		  <?php mosLoadModules ( 'user4', -1 ); ?>
		  		  </div>
		  		</div>
		  		<div class="clr"></div>
		  		<div id="header_outer">
		  			<div id="header">
		  			</div>
		  			<div id="top_outer">
						<div id="top_inner">
						<?php
                          if ( mosCountModules( 'top' ) ) {
                              mosLoadModules ( 'top', -2 );
                          } else {
                              ?>
			  				<span class="error">Top Module Empty</span>
			  				<?php
                          }
                          ?>
						 </div>
				  </div>
		  		</div>
		  		<div id="left_outer">
		  			<div id="left_inner">
		  			<?php mosLoadModules ( 'left', -2 ); ?>
		  			</div>
		  		</div>
		  		<div id="content_outer">
					<div id="content_inner">
					<?php
                      if ( mosCountModules ('banner') ) {
                          ?>
		  				<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="content_table">
						<tr>
								<td>
									<div id="banner_inner">
									<img src="<?php echo $mosConfig_live_site;?>/templates/rhuk_solarflare_ii/images/advertisement.png" alt="advertisement.png, 0 kB" title="advertisement" border="0" height="8" width="468" /><br />
			  					<?php mosLoadModules( 'banner', -1 ); ?><br />
									</div>
									<div id="poweredby_inner">
										<img src="<?php echo $mosConfig_live_site;?>/templates/rhuk_solarflare_ii/images/powered_by.png" alt="powered_by.png, 1 kB" title="powered_by" border="0" height="68" width="165" /><br />
									</div>
								</td>
							</tr>
							</table>
							<?php
                      }
                      ?>
		  			<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="content_table">
						<tr valign="top">
							<td width="99%">
								<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" class="content_table">

								<?php
                                if ($colspan > 0) {
                                ?>
									<tr valign="top">
										<?php
                                      if ( $user1 > 0 ) {
                                          ?>
				  						<td width="50%">
				  							<div class="user1_inner">
				  							<?php mosLoadModules ( 'user1', -2 ); ?>
				  							</div>
				  						</td>
				  						<?php
                                      }
                                      if ( $colspan == 3) {
                                         ?>
											<td width="2">
												<img src="<?php echo $mosConfig_live_site;?>/templates/rhuk_solarflare_ii/images/spacer.png" alt="" title="spacer" border="0" height="10" width="2" />
											</td>
										<?php
                                        }
                                      if ( $user2 > 0 ) {
                                          ?>
				  						<td width="50%">
				  							<div class="user2_inner">
				  							<?php mosLoadModules ( 'user2', -2 ); ?>
				  							</div>
				  						</td>
				  						<?php
                                      }
                                        ?>
									</tr>
									<tr>
										<td colspan="<?php echo $colspan; ?>">
											<img src="<?php echo $mosConfig_live_site;?>/templates/rhuk_solarflare_ii/images/spacer.png" alt="" title="spacer" border="0" height="2" width="100" /><br />
										</td>
									</tr>
									<?php
                                    }
                                ?>
								<tr>
									<td colspan="<?php echo $colspan; ?>">
										<div id="pathway_text">
										<?php mosPathWay(); ?>
										</div>
									</td>
								</tr>
								<tr>
									<td colspan="<?php echo $colspan; ?>" class="body_outer">
				  					 <?php mosMainBody(); ?>
									</td>
								</tr>
								</table>


							</td>
							<?php
                            if ( $right > 0 ) {
                          ?>
		  				<td>
			  				<div id="right_outer">
			  					<div id="right_inner">
			  					<?php mosLoadModules ( 'right', -2 ); ?>
			  					</div>
			  				</div>
		  				</td>
		  				<?php
                      }
                      ?>

						</tr>
						</table>
		  		</div>
		  	</div>
		  </td>
	  </tr>
  </table>
</div>
<?php include_once( $GLOBALS['mosConfig_absolute_path'] . '/includes/footer.php' ); ?>
<?php mosLoadModules( 'debug', -1 );?>
</body>
</html>

Can you see what I mean? I see all those 'load modules' but none of the seem to be linked to the news - if indeed, the news even applys as a module.

It all seems to be a bit of garbled rubbish to me - tables? When would a coder ever use tables in a design? I'm aware I don't really need to know PHP for this, but still, seeing all that unfamiliar code really doesn't help things... I can't even copy-paste into Dreamweaver to see what I'm doing!

I'll have a proper read through that article tomorrow morning, when my head isn't spinning due to lack of sleep. I don't expect to see it any clearer, however. I've been through that page once before - about 2 months ago, trying to make sense of it.

EDIT: Eek, it stretched the page. I hope you don't mind.

I don't, personally, use

JeevesBond — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:19:16 +0000

I don't, personally, use Joomla. Nevertheless, I expect your problem depends entirely on what Joomla template you're using.

It should just be a matter of learning a few basics of template authoring, then editing your template. Here's a tutorial to get you started (just skip to the relevant section).