Hi david, thank you! The troubles started when I wanted to have the banner with 100% width (the default layout has the banner at the left column only). The same with footer.
Basically, I had two goals in mind:
1) The layout will be as follows:
Banner – 100% width
——————————
Column with articles | Menu panel
——————————
Header – 100% width
2) The layout will be “infinitely” resizable – no matter how big fonts user wants, no part of the text will get overlapped or hidden.
I played with various positioning of the menu panel for a few hours, but I just could meet both requirements at the same time. Then I tried to make it with table, and got it working almost instantly. Anyway, I’m looking for ideas how to “do it right”.
Cheers,
Soso.
Chris,
Great site! Your reviews of various CMSs is done very well! I took a peek at your CSS, and, if I may, I’d like to suggest a couple of things.
First, it is good practice to define a background color in the BODY as well as a foreground (text) color. I happen to use:
background-color: #fff;
color: #000;
Also, in your font-family declarations, you use “Verdana” which is fine, but you should also declare a generic font like “sans serif” as well. Even though “Verdana” is very common, you still should have a generic alternate defined.
I like the way you dressed up the sidebar menu! I’m going to have to do some more poking around to see what other goodies you have hiding!
Keep up the good work, Chris!
Craig.
Soso –
Part 1 is easily doable. I didn’t bother with the footer being 100%, but there’s a lot of examples of doing so — I wanted the footer to follow the center block end, and not disappear off the page just because of the right menu block. But there are designs where you need that for visual effect… and it’s reasonably simple to add. If you look at http://www.chait.net, I’ve migrated from the original index, to a header + body/menu fluid style, to a header + menu/body/menu fluid style, to realizing that making the menus fluid was too much hassle and thus I stuck with the menu/body/menu, but now both menus are fixed width and only the body is fluid.
Part 2 is problematic. Depending on what ‘approach’ you take, many box rules break down when the content is bigger than the box boundaries. I’d say you can most reasonably get there with a fixed-width menu, though a fluid menu is still possible. Using pct widths is what I 0riginally had tried (first 20%/60%/20%, then 14%/72%/14%, then fixed…).
=d
Techgnome and davidchait,
I hate to tell you this, but your sites are not valid XHTML 1.0.
You should fix that.
Anonymous
David – for me, the ability to increase fonts size is important. If the user with weaker eyesight can’t have big fonts and see everything correctly, what’s the benefit for him that I’m “xhtml strict”? I definitely will not sacrifice usability and accessibility just for the sake of being “valid”. For example, in the default layout, when I am resizing more, the menu panel starts to overlap the banner – not a big issue, but it looks a bit ugly.
skatrek – regarding the Movable Type, I tried it before WP, and I also abandoned it for the similar reasons as you. The funny thing is, that as I am slowly diving deeper into WP code and understand how things work, I am naturally pushed to the “MT way” of doing things. For example, now I have two templates – one for main page and another one for article page. Now I realized, that I will want one more template for the category page (I want to display a static box with “Category Overview Info” next to articles when user click on category). I am just coming to conclusion, that it is definitely better to have template system where you use simple directives for displaying data from db, rather than call php methods. I read somewhere else in this forum that WP will use templates eventually, and I’m also supporter of this idea.
Soso.
I’m sorry, the previous post is mine, I just forgot to log in.
Soso
Soso – if you look at mine, you’ll see that I was able to achieve what you are looking for.
If you look at Position Is Everything they have some really great tuts on col layouts using CSS. Infact, it was one of their tuts (by Holly) that I used to get my site done.
TG
mrbob…. I know… I blame it on blogroll…. the link to add my site to your blogroll has a URL as part of the parameters sent, and so any query string item after that doesn’t validate….. I wish there was a way around it. I’ve tried playing with the order of the items in the query string, no dice.
The XHTML validation is also one reason I had to dump the calendar as it wouldn’t validate out where I had it.
Believe me… this is one thing that sticks in my craw….
TG
Thanks TG, I will look at your css. BTW, don’t you know about xhtml/css validator, which is a standalone windows application I can install localy on my pc, instead of going to w3c.org?
I know there is one. I don’t use it, as I do development in several locations. Also, byt using the online version, it tends to be more up to date (I’m very bad at getting the latest of anything) and I can then provide a link (as is the case on my site now) as a sort of “Badge of Honor” to show that it is valid.
TG
BTW: I got my invalid XHTML all fixed, and am now 100% valid again! Yay me!
mrbob – thanks, though I figured as much. I validated it a week ago, and there’s been a lot of new content stuff adding in. Need to go clean up the stragglers… 😉
=d
Thanks! I’ve been working with WP for, what, a month now? Most of that has been spent on how to rearchitect the index.php… And I’ve got some thoughts for how to make it more scalable (I guess ‘plug-ins’ or ‘blocks’ would be one way to look at it), and require only minimal changes to add new functions to a blog. But it definitely requires a quorum on how to best use/apply markup, including spans and divs as extra ‘boundaries’, and effective application of shared ‘class’ names, and a way to assure unique ‘id’ tagging… 😉
If I can just fix the minor things left remaining, and get the CSS re-validating, I’ll be happy. Time to get my first few articles going. Oh, and introduce my sub-categories (‘post type’) thing — that’s going to take some wp-admin hacking, which I am NOT looking forward to… so I might need some help. 🙂
=d
Started yet another YAWPS blog. This time based on cricket. The infamous insect that is…
Oh. No. It’s all about Cricket. The sport India is mad about. The game that causes the roads to go empty in broad day light. A sport which… blah blah…
URI: http://cricket.webdesign4india.com/
1 small thing I wanted to ask. I am using the simplest referral script I found out there::
<script language="Javascript" src="http://www.downes.ca/referrers.js"></script>
This breaks the validation. How to get it validated?!
Also, The site is as of now based on Allusion’s Charleen theme. As I am more interested in getting content. I will merge all the related blogs sometime soon. 🙂
Sushubh — looks pretty slick. I might suggest with CSS that you add margin/padding between the blocks on your sidebar, as it is just too crammed together.
While I’m at it, I’ll toss in a new plug for people to check out the latest at http://www.chait.net (my blo.gs and weblogs pings haven’t seemed to kick off as yet, so figure at least you folks will come visit!). You’ll see a lot of new additions, general tweaks, customizations (some post-related icons), and especially if you check out the first review you’ll see a lot of my custom features in action on each page of the post.
I’m still struggling with IE deciding to not wrap text around a floated div to the edge of the outer div (thought it used to work, but now not so sure), but otherwise looking good in IE and F.07 (the only two I’ve had time to constantly test).
I’ve got enough ‘pieces’ together that I can now focus for a while on content, and await the 1.0 release before trying to merge this mess again (AARGH!). I have so many code modifications sprinkled around that it’s not even funny…
Regards,
=d
