As an example of usefulness (although not beauty) take a look at this photo album. This wasn't an OpenACS site but since I had a simple photos package, written for OpenACS, I decided to adapt it to an AOLserver module. The original used ATS, and didn't use the 'grid' tag, so five images would just take up five columns and extend off the page. I didn't have a grid tag, but I did have an 'if' tag which takes standard tcl expressions, so it was easy to create a grid using a template fragment as simple as:
[if {($photos(rownum) % $cols) == 0} ]
</tr>
<tr>
[/if]
One nice feature of the ATS grid tag is that you can flip the orientation. In my system you would need to create a resource to do this, but it turns out to be very efficient. I created a proc which takes a list and creates another list, with a modified order, depending on the number of columns you want in the output. Since the foreach tag takes a list of arrays, the new list just accesses the arrays in a modified order, allowing you to create the flipped orientation.
I also found that the group tag is easy to replace. However, it is slightly ugly:
[set v ""]
[foreach row $rlist]
<tr>
[if {"$v" ne $row(a)}]
<th colspan="6" align="left">a = $row(a)</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
[else]
<td> </td>
[/if]
[set v $row(a)]
[/foreach]
You would have one if block for each group by.
