Custom formatting

Question

After some advice to get pointed in the right direction.

I am knocking together a site for a friend who isn't the most technical minded so want to make the process easy and of course Wordpress offers that. However I want to layout the pages a particular way such as http://www.apple.com/ipad/overview/ where content goes left right left right sort of thing with the image aligned alongside. I know this is probably possible using the editor however I want to make it easier and controlled in its format.

I was thinking possibly someway of having say a parent page with child pages under it essentially being pulled into the parent page instead of their own page themselves. Then with each page in the loop just alternating between left and right format. This doesnt offer lots of control to the person editing the site but keeps it simple. That was my best idea of handling it.

Is there another way that is better or is there an issue with the way I suggest like how sitemaps would be handled or dupicate content issues etc. Should I even be looking at custom post types? I just think that by using the children pages to handle it then they can attach a image via the featured post thumbnail image and alternate its positioning.

Thanks for any advice and pointers its greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

That is one way to do it, and I have done that for certain technically challenges clients. It is quick and simple. It does add a query to the parent page, but that isn't catastrophic. It would work fine if you have a few of these pages and aren't adding or editing them a lot.

The second option is to created a custom post type and add 'content-left'/'content-right' classes as you loop through. Each iteration you'd have something like $myclass = ($myclass == 'content-left') ? 'content-right' : 'content-left'; and your stylesheet takes over from there. It is slightly more complicated to set up but ultimately will probably be better, especially if you have a lot of posts. Managing Pages gets to be a pain, in my opinion, if you have a lot of them.