Any guidance on how to approach building this? Component? Template?

[dmerrill]

I'm a joomla noob, and am hoping for the guidance of the collective wisdom of folks out in joomland on this likely straightforward question.  How should we go about building pages such as this one?  We have several such to build, and there's a common structure to it.

Here's a rough image of what I'm trying to achieve.  How do we lay out the center and right columns, as a single page?



Is this where we should be building a custom template?  or using modules (not sure how to specify which quote, for example, to include on which page, though)?  or a custom component?  or is moslate the easiest way to approach (seems to have author usability issues, though)?

Here's an example of another series of pages we need to build (and preferably enable end-user editors to safely update):


Thanks in advance for your help!
Dave

[ashar]

I think you must go for any 3 column template

[dmerrill]

Thanks for the suggestions, ashar.  Looking back at my question, I realize it wasn't specific enough.  Let me try again.

There are a dozen or so pages like this, and they are all similar.  I'm fine creating a template for this set of pages, but it doesn't seem wise to create a dozen separate templates.

Each of these is a "Category Blog" page.  The content in the right column is specific to each such page.

The category title ("Music Committee" in this case) needs to span both the center and right columns.

There's separate styling needed for the "charter" statement box.

See comments in this mockup:


I don't see how to map these requirements to a single template, because with a template, I don't see how to:

• cause the page title to span the center and right columns
• coordinate the "committee members" box content with the specific committee (which is a category)
• style the "charter" box appropriately

Seems to me that I'm looking for more structure (both page layout structure, and data structure) than Joomla provides.
Am I missing something?

Thanks!
Dave