Customising the first item in a view

Question

As a block on my homepage I'm trying to output:

<ul>
  <li><a><img><p>Node 1</p></a></li>
  <li><a>Node 2</a></li>
  <li><a>Node 3</a></li>
  <li><a>Node 4</a></li>
</ul>

where each <li> represents a node, and the image/text supplied by CCK fields attached to each node.

Currently, I'm using a block view to output nodes 2-4, and an Attachment view to present the first node as outlined here: http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/the-views2-attachment-display

The problem is my output ends up more like this:

<div class="attachment attachment-before">
  <div class="view view-homepage-news ..">
    <div class="item-list">
      <ul>
        <li class="views-row ...">  
          <a><img><p>Node 1</p></a>            
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>  
  </div> <!-- /.view -->
</div>
<div class="item-list">
  <ul>
    <li class="views-row ..."><a>Node 2</a></li>
    <li class="views-row ..."><a>Node 3</a></li>
    <li class="views-row ..."><a>Node 4</a></li>
  </ul>
</div>

I can probably bend that output suit my purpose, but it will involve a lot of templating and configuration. I'd also like to avoid using CSS and/or JavaScript to modify the output, unless that's my only option.

Given this, what's the easiest way to get the output closer to what I need it to be?

Edit: here's some rough php code I'm using in the customfield php code field (based on Jeremy French's suggestion: Here's the code I'm using in my PHP Code customfield:

<?php
  ++$static;
  if ($static == 1) {
    $nd=node_load($data->nid);
    $img_path = imagecache_create_path('news_image_thumbnail', $nd->field_image[0]['filepath']);
    print '<a><img src="' . $img_path . '"><p>Node 1</p></a>';
  } else {
    print "<a>Node $static</a>";
  }
?>

Answer 1

You could do something with views_customfield.

You add a php field, get it only to display the markup you want (no containing elements) and output a value only for row number 1.

Answer 2

I personally use preprocess functions to do this, something like the following:

function HOOK_preprocess_views_view_fields(&$vars) {
  if ($vars['view']->name == 'VIEW_NAME' && $vars['view']->row_index == 1) {
    // Do stuff here.
  }
}

Answer 3

I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question correctly, but I believe you could use Semantic Views module for this. If you set the Style under Basic Settings to Semantic Views, you'll then have an option under the Semantic Views settings to set a "first class attribute", which will help you target the first list item in your view in your theme's style.css file.

Answer 4

The easiest solution is with a custom template. It doesn't need to be a lot of work though. With the theming information available in the views interface you can see what template you need to change. All you need to do, is to add some code to print the extra items for the first node. Views will loop through each row, so should be easy.