Dani

jonimueller – Sorry, but for me CSS is like climbing Mount Everest. It took me about an hour to lay out the template for my site revamp. And it’s a great layout. Looks great and validates HTML 4.01 Transitional. But, two days later I’m still struggling with WordPress and CSS. Oh, *my* CSS is fine… all my text is formatted just the way I want it, all my links, etc. No, it’s only when I go and set up the wordpress loop that everything gets ugly.
Admittedly, that’s a not so much a problem with WordPress as it is trying to blend my HTML with a script that tries to produce XHTML-compliant output.
So here’s the new question. Which WordPress script file actually handles the output, the one that writes tags such as ” li” and class data such as class=”category-post”? The only way I think I’ll ever be able to make this work the way I’d like it to is to simply eliminate this forced output from the script.

Umm… no bulleting, for starters.
I really don’t understand anything beyond the most basic of CSS.
the_category() gives me a bulleted category in my template even when I remove my own stylesheet and point to the stylesheet for the default WordPress layout, which doesn’t have a bulleted category output in “Filed Under – ” section of each post.

TechGnome: Search engines? Find and categorize content efficiently? It sounds like you blog for traffic? Me, personally, I could care less about search engines and more for ease of use. And for me, CSS is not easy. I have a hard enough time using stylesheets to format text. I can’t even begin to imagine the horrors involved in trying to lay out an entire page based on CSS.
I just don’t get the “a list is a list.” My html code, repeated, forms a list. Does it really matter *how* the list is made? I’m an extremely picky person… I believe the devil’s in the details, but this sematically correct stuff seems like overkill to me. As long as it looks like a list to the visiting client, how it gets done is of no great importance to me.
Davidchait: Actually, I wasn’t too impressed with b2’s archive output either, considering it’s really no different from WordPress’. I put up with it, only because I couldn’t figure out how to change it, either. The archive/links list output is really the only thing I dislike about WordPress… I have yet to see a WordPress site that has really blown me away with how the archives and links are formatted. And that just isn’t good enough for me anymore. I need to find a way of making the output visually striking.
Danielle

Ah, thanks for the response. And had I read through your response entirely before freaking out over how someone’s profile at livejournal ended up linked to my URL I wouldn’t have sat in abject wonder for as long as I did. <sigh> It’s been a long day and it ain’t over yet…
I know that a single install of b2 or WordPress wasn’t originally meant to be used by several different people, each with their own templates, but given the flexibility of the post/content tags in b2, it’s quite doable, with nothing more complicated than an extra the_author() tag on important links. I could certainly install multiple copies of WordPress to get around the problem of different CSS layouts for each template, but that would take the fun and (possibly) originality out making the package do something it wasn’t meant to without using or writing any hacks.
For now, I think I’m going to have to stick with b2, simply because it provides the minimal amount of fuss for getting this thing up and running. It lacks the links manager added to WordPress, of course, but I’m willing to sacrifice that in trade for CSS flexibility. My goal is to provide a single CSS layout for each person that they can change as they want, and that’s simply not going to be possible with WordPress.
Perhaps in the future, if the developer(s) of WordPress add in similar flexibilty for the links template tags, I’d definitely be willing to give WordPress another looksee. Until then, it just doesn’t offer enough new features to be worth the new frustrations.
I appreciate everyone’s willingness to try and help. It’s nice to find a script package that has such a loyal and helpful following!
Danielle
http://attemptfailure.com

Sorry Craig. It’s been a long night. Been working on the new layout non-stop since about 7 pm last night. No sleep, just a lot of Mountain Dew.
For starters, I need to be able to insert tags to format the outputted text, using my existing CSS. Then there’s that darn bulleted link text that WordPress thinks needs to be outputted with the actual links.
One thing I liked about b2 (and it’s been retained in WordPress as far as I can tell) is that the template tags, at least for the posts, were/are *very* flexible. I can use just about any combination of post/content tags to format the output just about every possible way I could dream of. Unfortunately, as nice as the new links manager feature would be to have, it’s nowhere near as flexible. At least not that I’ve figured out yet.
If I have to start editing additional files to format the output for the links, I might as well just skip the idea, because I won’t be able to change the appearance between different pages.