News grid

The news grid is a menu that shows recent articles as a card grid. In Aragorn it is meant for the home page, as one section among the featurebox sections — not for news.php, which has its own listing.

Placing it

Two ways, both valid.

Menu Manager

Admin → Menus, drag News Grid into a menu area of the home layout. Its settings — how many items, which category, which layout — are on the menu's own configuration form.

Directly in the layout

Write it into layouts/home_layout.html:

{MENU: path=news/news_grid&caption=Latest news&limit=6&source=latest&featured=1&layout=col-lg-4}

This route is useful when the grid should always be in a fixed position and you would rather not have it movable from the admin area.

Parameters

Parameter	Does
layout	Which card layout — see the table below
limit	How many articles
source	latest, sticky, or a category
featured	How many of the first articles get the large card
caption	Section heading — see below

Available layouts

layout value	Result
col-lg-4	Three cards per row on large screens, two on medium
col-md-4	Three per row
col-md-3	Four per row
col-md-6	Two per row
media-list	Compact rows with a thumbnail, no cards

The first article can be given a full-width horizontal card by setting featured to 1.

Section heading

The grid only gets Aragorn's section wrapper — the <section> band with a centred heading — when a caption is set. Without one, the cards are output on their own with no wrapper and no heading, and any {SETSTYLE=...} before the menu appears to do nothing.

{SETSTYLE=section}
{MENU: path=news/news_grid&caption=Latest news&limit=6&layout=col-lg-4}

There is no in-between: either a caption and the section band, or neither. For a band with no heading, write the <section> markup around the menu in the layout file yourself.

The same applies to the Menu Manager route — fill in the menu's caption field.

If a grid has no articles to show — an empty category, or sticky with no sticky articles — nothing is output at all, not even an empty band. Sections that can legitimately be empty will not leave a gap on the page.

Link to all news

Every grid layout ends with a All news button linking to the full news listing, so the grid can sit on a landing page without the article list behind it. The button's label comes from LAN_THEME_NEWS_ALL in the theme's language file; translate it there.

Known issue: the Featured setting

The Featured setting on the Menu Manager form has no effect — this is a bug in e107 itself, not in the theme, and it has been reported upstream. The form saves the value under a different name than the one the news renderer reads.

Until it is fixed, place the grid directly in the layout instead and write featured=1 in the parameters, which works correctly.