Skinning News

[flynryan692]

Ok, so on my frontpage I have a column for each thing like new pilots, pirep and news, now the news is setup to only show the first few sentences of the story then I have a read more link...what I want to do is limit the number of characters that are shown, then I want the full story to be in another file. I'm guessing I'll need to edit the news_newsitem.tpl file to only show x amount of letters and what not then make a new .tpl file to have the full story in.

So, here is my question, how do I limit the characters..like the php..I'm a php n00b..

How do I echo the link to the full story..I'm guessing each news story has an id in the database..? Php is so confusing...sorry..

Thanks.

[simpilot]

You can limit the number of characters returned in a string using substr

substr($data,0,100)

would return the characters from position 0 to position 100 in the $data string.

To echo a link to your news item you could add

$this->set('id', $row->id);

on the blank line 46 in news.php in root/core/modules/news

then in your template echo it out something like

echo '<a href="'.url(my_custom_news).'/'.$id.'">Click For Full Story</a>

That would point to a module you have built "my_custom_news", you can name it whatever you want, that would collect the news id number and you can point it to a tpl that will show the entire news story.

Or you could just use - Simpilot PopUpNews Module

[flynryan692]

Whoa, thanks big help!