I’m just wondering if there are any themes out there that have a different blog layout, specifically one that has a tiled featured image for each blog post on the main page. I know that there are a lot of WordPress themes that have blog layouts like this (e.g. http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/nexus/, or http://demo.thunderthemes.net/oldpaper/)
I love building with Rapidweaver, but there are a lot of WordPress themes that offer tiled blog layouts.
This theme by The Mountain Moves looks interesting: http://www.tmmtekh.com/themes/linchpin/rwpages/blog.html …I’ve never seen an RW blog page like this before! But would this layout work if I use Armadillo for blogging, rather than the built in RW blog page style? Does anyone out there own this theme, and if so, do you know if it’s Armadillo compatible?
Thanks for the suggestion, @robbeattie! It looks like Archetypon has some interesting blog layouts. Unfortunately, they aren’t exactly what I’m looking for. I was hoping for something that is very image-based for the main page…like a 3 x 2 grid of images, with the blog post title and date overlaid each image.
Maybe this is a stack that someone could develop??..a stack that could import the 6 latest blog posts, pull in the first image from each post, and overlay the title over top…and each image would link to the blog post permalink.
My approach would be to use the RSS feed the RW blog generates. Using Javascript you could fetch the first 6 most-recent items out of the RSS file, parse it into HTML and then you’d be in a position where you could probably layout and style the main image, title and permalink however desired.
The only potential snag I see is that the blog is a Realmac component of RapidWeaver - and not something any of us underdog developers can influence or change! Therefore should the RW blog page type change in future (and suppose RSS support was dropped, for whatever reasons) potentially that leaves the developer of such a stack liable to handing out lots of refunds for an addon that no longer works! And therefore that might go someway towards explaining why such a plugin does not exist.
I think I’d only be confident of building something if I also had control of the underlying blog too. But with so many blog addons available for RW now, I suspect it would be difficult to find any sort of market for another blog addon.
Thanks for the explanation, Will. Too bad, I was hoping that someone would be able to code something like that. I guess WordPress is the way to go if clients want a blog layout that is image-based.
I have also been trying to figure out how to do something like this. Ideally I would like to use Armadillo to keep control of the blog but then somehow, feed the Blog summaries into a 3 column grid. I was hoping to be able to use Solo Contents for each blog entry which almost works except there is no summary feature in Solo Content.
The other possible way to achieve this would be to use a Tumblr RSS fee but selectively display the blog entries you want. I don’t know of a way to do that but it seems that most of the building blocks might be there.
You can use Armadillo to create that. Just put the image you want on the main page in the Summary box with or without some teaser text and you’re good to go.
@LaPan that’s a really interesting idea! But wouldn’t it still load the blog posts vertically? Is there a way to tweak it so that I had a responsive grid of images?
If you look at one of the pages you mentioned, the blogs are actually positioned traditionally (newest on top, and full width) with just a teaser on top of the page with the exact same graphic as down below. Personally, I don’t get the need for both on the same page and I prefer a straightforward ‘show me the latest’ top to bottom structure (as in the nexus page you listed above). If you’re looking for something different, then your journey will continue.
