Is Newspaper column layout possible with MODx?

I’m a professional developer currently evaluating MODx for a new website project.

My design requires multiple stories arranged in thin vertical columns like a newspaper, or magazine.  Sometimes mixed formats like: one wide column, followed by three narrow columns, followed by one one wide column.

This arrangement would be separate from the normal nav and news columns, which would also be present on the page.

See http://www.aldaily.com/ or http://www.hawaii-hotline.com/ for examples, although these are not my sites.

Is this possible or practical in MODx?  I haven’t seen any templates that support this behaviour and I’m still working through the documentation to try to understand how or if it’s possible.  Perhaps someone can save me many hours of research with a few quick keystrokes.

If someone has done this, or posesses sufficient skills to demonstrate it, I’d be happy to create a paying job ticket to get some templates implemented, get us over the hump.

Thanks very much.

If you can build thte templates, it’s very possible. MODx doesn’t impose ANY layout restrictions whatsoever.

With modx you can create any type of layout.
If you can find only 1,2 or 3 column Templates layout, it’s because are most used.

This is, for me (i’m a Designer not coder), the best feature of MODx - no more limits!!

That should be VERY simple to do with MODx.

You could have a separate template for each # of columns with separate tv’s for each column.

Then when editing each page you would have control over what appears in each column either manually (via pure html or chunks) or automatically (via snippets).

If you need an example, take a look at some of the sidebar tv methods on the forums. You could just duplicate this for the # of columns.

my be i’s this one you are lookinf for?
http://www.robertnyman.com/roblab/javascript.htm

Thanks for all the comments. I have created one implementation, still working with it to see if it can meet all of the requirements.

I will let you all know how it turned out, thanks again for the help.

Cool javascript hack, Nissai, the most useful pointer for me so far.

without giving any opinion
article 1 http://www.alistapart.com/articles/css3multicolumn
article 2 : problems http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200509/css3_multicolumn_layout_considered_harmful/

and for the final, the best of the best
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/onetruelayout/examples

I agree with what has been said before about using TVs, javascript and css to do a multicolumn layout for a webzine.

Yet, using TVs doesn’t provide a real "a la newspaper" layout. I mean the solution mentionned above (javascript excepted) don’t really allow to have one single content flowing through multiple columns. It either require having a "splitter" string inserted in the content or have some kind of php function counting words and splitting the content into equal parts (2, 3 or more...) automatically.

I know a little about this because I experienced with a textpattern plugin that does just this : jcb_columnize (can’t give you a link, since textpattern.org is down at the moment, but here is the attachement, for those coders who’d be curious about how this has been done).

Have a look at this:

http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ThreeColumnLayouts should find pretty much any type of layout you desire from there.
Mind you most of them are liquid or elastic layouts.

Making a snippet out of this, and use that snippet to parse the current doc content will work like a charm. The problem is, who will take the first step to do the snippet? Heheheheee...