How to split content over different regions... views? I have a client who wants to allow some editorial staff to create and edit 'main pages' on their site. These are things like 'about us', 'our clients', 'breaking news' and so on; they want these 'main pages' to follow a house style (one main image, relevant links here, block quote there, content in the middle, etc.)

The site is built with Drupal 7.

I'm thinking that the way to go is probably using a custom content type, 'main_article' and then using views to display various fields from that content type in the relevant blocks - so, for example, having a 'main content' block that sits in the content region and displays the title and main content, 'picture' and 'links' blocks that both go in the left column, and 'citation' and 'blah' blocks over in the right column.

I guess I would use the 'Content: NID' contextual filter to make sure that I only get content from the relevant 'main_article'.


This seems like a standard enough design issue: Am I going about it in the right way?
Is there a better solution?  (I've seen similar questions here and elsewhere that led me to follow this way of doing it.)
How would I go about getting the 'main_article' content type to put a link in the main navigation menu?
Using the menu option in the content creation page would link to the default content, not the view (if you see what I mean). Could it be done using a field?  
If the user creates a URL Path for the content they create using this content type, that's going to break the 'content: NID' contextual filter. Is there a way of 'contextual filtering' on the URL (which should then work for standard node URLs and for 'nice' URL paths)?
An simple solution is to use the Panels module and Page Manager from ctools module to override the default node page for your content type.  That way you also do not have to worry about menus, sitemaps etc.

The downside is that you cannot easily use the blocks defined in the template to position parts of the nodes content.