Can I stop the sidebar from wrapping in IE?

  • In Firefox, my site seems to view fine under all circumstances I have tried.

    In IE, however if the user has the left side panel open to their favorites or history, etc., this reduces horizontal screen space. If the width of the IE side favorites panel is too wide to allow my site to fit on the screen, what I would like is for my site to automatically go to a horizontal scroll at the bottom rather than adjust the width of the sidebar.

    What happens now is my side bar, which has two columns, does one of three things depending on the width of the users screen and how wide they have their favorites side panel set. My site either displays correctly if there is enough horizontal screen space, or displays with some of the longer sidebar text lines bumped down to the next line but still in two columns, or bumps the left sidebar column to the bottom of the page.

    Is there a way to make it scroll rather than mess up the sidebar?

    Thanks.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • You need to use a theme that is fixed width rather than liquid. If you look in your CSS you’ll probably find widths that are expressed as a %. Change them to pixels. Depending on how your theme is built, this might mess up other things. So it might be easier to start with a non-liquid theme. Or look for a theme that is semi-liquid; i.e. the sidebars are a static width, but the main column adjusts depending on the window size.

    Thread Starter Will Taft

    (@wt)

    Yes, the theme uses percentages. Below is what is has for the two sidebar columns. I can try changing these two to pixels and see what happens. I don’t want to change the theme at this point as I already spend too much time on stuff like this and not enough time on the stuff I wanted a blog for in the first place. If I can’t get it to work, I guess I will just have to leave it and let people close their favorites panel in IE to see it correctly.

    ‘
    .rightsub{

    float:left;

    width:45%;

    }

    .rightsub2{

    float:right;

    width: 45%;

    }’

    Thread Starter Will Taft

    (@wt)

    Update: I set the sidebar to fixed widths in my theme and it did not seem to mess anything else up. (Crosses fingers!)

    However, doing this did not fix the original issue. In IE, with the left side panel open to favorites or history, the screen still does not scroll. The side bar is reduced in width until it bumps to the bottom of the page.

    What I want is for the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the IE window to come up, rather than trash the layout of the sidebar. How can I do that?

    There may be percentages on more than just your sidebar, or in more than one place in your sidebar. If the sidebar still changes sizes, then you haven’t found the percentage that is controlling it.

    Unless you want to spend a lot of time digging under the covers of your theme and figuring out how it’s built and what makes it liquid, the easiest solution would be to find a theme that is already fixed width and then modifying it to fit your look and feel.

    Since the “min-width” property is not available in IE, it in particular will require some hacking in your CSS to make the theme only partially liquid. That’s why I suggest finding one that already does what you want.

    Position Is Everything is a good source for how to deal with bugs in all of the various browsers and W3 Schools has great references on HTML, CSS and PHP.

    Thread Starter Will Taft

    (@wt)

    OK, thanks. I spent way too much time making the Andreas theme I am using look and work the way I wanted, so the idea of going through that again with a new theme is daunting. That, plus I looked at hundreds of themes before I found one I eve liked a little bit!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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