Changing Default Sidebar Background Colors

Everything’s gone mad! It looks like you put get_header() inside the loop, your header is being repeated for every post you’ve made!

Actually, maerk, I think the “repeating” areas are screen shot images he took while trying to document what he was doing ??

Tir, I’d suggest editing those screenshots a bit – as they *do* look like posts within posts. You might want to scale them down quite a bit so they don’t run off the page and are in the viewable area of the screen (i.e., they stay in your container!), and so they’ll look more like screenshots instead of odd posts ??

As for changing the background color of your sidebar – that’s pretty easy to do. Look for this in your stylesheet:

#sidebar {
font: 1em 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;;
}

and change it to this:

#sidebar {
font: 1em 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
background-color:#CCC;
}

Note the addition of a background color, and the removal of the extra “;” from the font line. If your headers, li’s and ul’s within the sidebar have a background color, change it to “transparent;” and you should be all set.

Oh, I just checked, yeah that’s probably more likely ??

The layout is utterly destroyed in IE 6 though, those images are way too big for the content area!

Don’t bother.
That grey is an image:
https://jason.ithought.org/wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickbg.jpg

Just with the stylesheet you’ll never change the colour of the WHOLE sidebar.

Good point, I didn’t realize that. So you’ll have to edit the background image itself to change it. (And for the record, i was viewing it in Safari 2.0 on Mac OSX – and I believe i’m seeing the same problems as maerk is – totally whacked because the images are too big!)

yeah i just viewed my site in IE (i normally use firefox) and i see how its distorting. If i resize the screenshots how can i link to the original size image? In other words, right now i have a small image on the front page (300×214) but i want to link to a bigger image (800×570).

(also i deleted that post about changing the bgcolor. its such an easy fix that i don’t feel it deserves such intense documentation.)

Just make the smaller thumbnail image clickable – that’s all. People click on the little picture to see the big one – just like a regular link.

right, but do i have to upload the thumbnail and full size pictures or do i only upload the full size and WP automatically creates the thumb?

It depends. If you upload them via FTP – you have to make the thumbnails.
If you use the upload facility in the Write Post panel – WP will create the thumbnail size pics.

yeah the permissions weren’t automatically set when it creates a thumbnail. so it was displaying a broken image link. I have to log onto my server and update them manually. I’ll have to find a way to do this automatically.

Maybe i’ll just FTP everything: create thumbnails on my own using photoshop and then ftp ’em up (when I ftp something it automatically gives it the desired permissions). Also because i can’t find an easy-to-use, easy-to-setup WP plugin that lets me decide the size of the thumbnail.