Themes

Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee 18 Sep 2007 05:01 GMT-0000

> Gary wrote:
> >> The center column table cell appears to be doing as instructed, going way wide, which may be the cause of the problem. I don't think there's a need to specify a width here.
>
> Back when I succeeded in getting my site to display well in IE, specifying the center column's width at 98% was part of the solution.
>
> I believe the 98% is relative to the width remaining after subtracting the side columns from the main division. Even if I'm wrong about that, specifying 98% did result in me getting a page that (previously) rendered beautifully in IE.

OK, was just a thought.

> I removed the 98% width parameter, but it made no difference to the currently askew display in Firefox or IE.
>
> I subsequently removed wide parameters specified on
> DIV#tiki-main,
> div.wikitext and
> .wikitopline table,
> but those changes did not fix the display either.

A good tool for finding which divs are where and if maybe they aren't workin right is the Firebug add-on for Firefox browser. Using this, you can run the mouse over your page and the divs will be identified. And it has other inspection tools too.

Since your theme isn't too far off of the standard Tiki themes in terms of fundamental layout, I think it'd be best to not bother with template editing at all and just use a custom style sheet. I don't know what you're plans are, but template editing isn't really needed unless you want new functionality or a pretty radical layout change. What I do when stuck with some behavior I can't figure out is to compare to themes that I know work correctly. The more the custom theme has in common with those working themes, the easier that is. In other words, start with something close to a working theme and after every significant modification, check with the browsers to make sure it's still displaying properly.

-- Gary