What is a TOP item?

[artcop]

It's referenced all over the XML and in the sales material but it's not clear what it is.

Thanks,

[Lisa]

TOP items is a sort of main news or featured articles.
Look at the template Columns http://raxo.org/built-in-templates/all- ... lumns.html. The first 2 news are TOP items.
So, most of our templates (not all of them) consist of 2 parts - TOP items and items. You can manage their design and thumbnail size separately.
If you don't want to use TOP items, just skip the relevant fields in the module administration panel.

[ichow]

Can you pick which article(s) to be Top items? If so, how?

[Lisa]

TOP Items are the first articles among all items you set.

E.g. you display 6 articles, and 2 of them are TOP items.
There are many ordering options, and you can find the right one that will put the necessary items at the first place.

The easiest way is to set source selection by article IDs and set exact ordering.

Another way is to set ordering like in the article manager, and in the article manager put the necessary articles at the first place.

[amzen]

Hello,
I need to show new articles in an intranet. For top article enphasize, I see two logical groups: TOP articles and regular articles. It's ok for me.
But it seems you have only one means to Emphasize top articles : larger text and bigger thumbnails.
I need another mean to show TOP articles : Either another color of title or a different background color, or a small icon 'NEW' or 'nouveau' in french, who shows the difference with others articles.
This is mandatory for me. Does this feature exists ? If not, is there a simple mean to manage it ? Can you provide this feature ?
Thank you, Hugues

[Lisa]

Your questions do not require new module features. You can do that now, yet it requires some very basic understanding of CSS.

Yes, the module is divided into two logical groups, which means you can configure and design them separately.
Configuration means changing settings in the module parameters like show or hide some content elements (date, author, etc), change images size, text amount.
Design is pure CSS. TOP items have their own CSS classes that you can use to assign your own rules for TOP items elements - change font size, font color, apply another color or image backgrounds, etc.

Each module template has its own CSS file. This file is well-structured and fully commented, so you easily find the pieces of the code.