There is a small thread in the Joomla! Forum under that title. Now, in theory it is very simple to display articles side by side.

• Open the module parameter tab in the module manager
• Enter a value in “Number of items displayed”
• Set the value for “leading paragraphs” to 0
• Set the value for “numer of columns” to the same value as “Number of items displayed”
• You might want to set “width” to a sufficently large value if you set “Output mode” to table (so the width of a column should be the value for width divided by the number of columns)

However there is a catch, because this will only work when your template has actually enough horizontal room to display the articles side by side, if it hasn’t the result might be a little unpredictable. The template mentioned in the original post was Rocketthemes “Catalyst” and for that I can only point to my post about compatibility with commercial templates.

I haven’t had much opportunity to use Joomla 1.5 in production – in fact, now is  the first time that I use it for a ‘real’ project. I just finished entering my articles when I realised that they were still showing print,pdf and mail-buttons in the frontend (they weren’t supposed to).  Since the article parameters were all set to “‘use global” I changed the parameters for the article component – to absolutely no effect.

A post in the Joomla Forum said that a change of the global setting would not affect existing articles but have effect only on newly created articles. What the fuck ? If this is true it’s completely retarded  behaviour.

So I hope that I made some stupid mistake and there is in fact a way to change the parameters for some 100 articles in one go. Can anybody help me ?

For those who read german, Jakob has written a brilliant review of the Indiana Jones movie, which covers all the points I would have had to mention hadn’t I preferred to reminisce about the olden days. If you’re less interested in soppy stories about my personal life and more in finding out how critical theory pertains to Indiana Jones you should read this.

I got two responses for my SQL-post, one from Richard in the comments and one  from Robin (who is the one who had asked for the new ordering option in the first place).  Obviously  they  are more careful readers than I am, since the  answer  was  right there in the MySql manual page. Oh well, I can’t do everything right, can I ? In any case I wanted to say a quick thank you to both of them.