WordPress.org

1. teknochik
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   I have about 5 privately hosted WP blogs, but I never attempted to mess with their CSS before. I started a brand new one tonight and thought I'd have a play with customising this premium theme I bought for another site (it's a multi site licence).

   Ok... well, I stupidly assumed that, knowing html pretty well, if I stared long enough at CSS I would "get it" and be able to make simple changes the theme.

   Well, it was going great guns for a little while. I had all the backgrounds, fonts, links and tabs just the way I wanted them. Was looking promising and I kept making only one small change at a time.

   BUT... then I decided I want to change the look of the page and category menus and all hell broke loose because I started "interpreting" what I thought the code meant (big mistake). I made one blooper and it simply wouldn't let me undo it. No matter how many times I flushed my cache out, it still was a mess.

   So I copied and pasted the original CSS that I had on another blog, but it made it WORSE and all my widgets merged into the page.

   Then I uninstalled the theme, thinking its CSS would go with it, but then all the other themes had exactly the same problems.

   Now I'm stuck with a site that is 100% unusable and I feel like a dope.

   Fortunately, as this is a brand new site there is NO content on it at all yet. But I am totally STUCK here. What do I do? Do I need to uninstall/reinstall WP on the site altogether? Is there any way of restoring a CSS once it is corrupt?

   Your help is SO appreciated!

2. teknochik
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Hmmm... actually... I read another post that said something about a div tag and I think I found the problem. My template seems to be back to default settings now.

   I would STILL be interested to know the answer to my query, however.

   Also... any recommendations for "how to" resources on CSS for dummies?

   Thanks!

3. henkholland
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   In Firefox there is an addon called Firebug. That shows by clicking on your site, what piece of css influences that part of the site. You can even do edits and see the difference (but not save them through FF)

4. Gerald
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Are you experimenting your theme on a live server directly from the WordPress admin interface?

   It is recommended that you develop using a local development server rather than a live one.

   Online, I used to visit http://www.csszengarden.com It shows the same HTML file but different CSS creating different effects. I learned by cross referencing them and studying the files.

   A few books I've read:

   • Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design
   • The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
   • Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design

5. lokrin2000
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Or buy a small CSS reference book like O'Reilly's CSS Pocket Reference for around $10.

   ISBN 0-596-00777-9

   It's not an instruction manual, but it does have a pretty good introduction and explains properties and values pretty well for almost all declarations you will use.

6. s_ha_dum (was apljdi)
   Member
   Posted 2 years ago #

   Henkholland's suggestion that you use Firebug is a good one. It only works in Firefox so you may not be seeing browser compatibility issues. IE8 has a feature similar to Firebug (but not as good) and Chrome also has a similar feature. Once you install Firebug you can install CodeBurner and get an html and css reference integrated into Firebug. I also like the FF add-on View Source Chart.

Topic Closed

This topic has been closed to new replies.