Can the text be in line with the featured image?

@michele Rigby,

I’m glad you found the plugin useful.

I was pretty inexperienced when I wrote the custom template files that the plugin uses, but I did build in a way you could override those templates. Overriding the Archive template would allow you to get the look you want.

First, you need to copy the archive-news.php template into your theme folder (as described in the plugin FAQ page).

What’s the easiest way to create my own custom version of the news templates?

Copy (don’t move) the template you wish to customize from /wp-content/plugins/views/ to /wp-content/themes/<your-theme-name>/. Modify the PHP and HTML of the copy in your theme folder, but leave the plugin version alone. You may want to refer back to it if something goes wrong, or you may want to copy new features from it to your custom templates after a plugin update.

Second, in the copy of that file that you made in your theme folder, change lines 35-42 from what’s there now:

<div class="entry-content">
                  <?php
                  if ( function_exists('has_post_thumbnail') && has_post_thumbnail() ) {
                    the_post_thumbnail();
                  }
                  ?>
                  <div class="summary"><?php the_excerpt(); ?> <a class="moretag" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"> Read the full news article</a></div>
          </div>

to something like this:

<div class="entry-content">
              <div class="summary">
                  <?php
                  if ( function_exists('has_post_thumbnail') && has_post_thumbnail() ) {
                    the_post_thumbnail('thumbnail', array( 'class' => 'alignleft' ));
                  }
                  ?>
                  <?php the_excerpt(); ?> <a class="moretag" href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"> Read the full news article</a>
              </div>
          </div>

Basically, you want to bring the check for a thumbnail and the WordPress template tag which includes the thumbnail into the div with the class of summary. In the sample code above, I also modified that template tag to add a class of “alignleft” to the included image tag, which will make if float left in the standard WordPress themes (Twenty-whatever).

Depending on which theme you are using, you may need to modify that class, or create your own class with float: left and any custom padding to make a left-aligned thumbnail look good in your list.

I don’t have time right now to update the plugin, and if people are using the default look, they may not want me to change it. But this method of overriding the default behavior is a safe and straightforward way to get your News archive the look you want.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for helping out – I could follow your instructions to replace the code easily enough. But unfortunately, although it does exactly what I want in terms of aligning left, I don’t know what to do to make the next news item start underneath the previous one – it starts to the right of the previous one, giving a kind of stepped effect (not pretty!) when five or six of them follow on.

I think that it is probably to do with the padding issue that you referred to above, but I am simply not experienced enough to know what to do next.

The thumbnails are 100×100, so I imagine that I need to force the excerpt to take up at least that 100px of space, so the following item can’t muscle its way in to the space for the current item of news.