New Theme 3 columns ?

Considering 3 column themes generally leave me completely cold, I find yours is rather nice and will no doubt be much nicer once it’s “done”.

The only really jarring note for me is that the “cloud background” is too “blue-white” to go with the tan of the columns background. But that’s a totally personal color preference.

Hope you’ll post again when you’ve finished the CSS and clean-up work. It may be the only 3 column theme I’d ever consider using – and I think that’s because it’s “compressed”, with a lot of negative space around the actual usable area.

I, too, am impressed by your 3-col design. You seem to have overcome problems that I’ve had trying to modify the Trident 3-col theme to create three separate columns and a header. I can get my them to work in Firefox but in IE when I “float: left” the lefthand menu, the menu drops to the bottom of the center-column content. When I use “position: absolute” for the left-hand menu, it disappears completely in IE. I’ve fiddled with the margins and column widths, reducing them to see if that would work, but to no help. Any ideas? Would you be willing to share the Body part of your theme, so that I might see how you’ve overcome or avoided these problems?

@pomodoro,
I have worked with trident and I found it very stable axross browsers. However ALL the width values are inter-related, so if you change one, you have to figure out what else has to be changed accordingl;y (which is not a trident specific issue, it’s CSS).
The only reason I can think about when it comes to “sinking” sidebar(s): you have something (an element, a long link, a script etc.) that is wider than the width value for that sidebar. But if you play around with the “floats” – you certainly get yourself in trouble ??

I’ve reduced all column widths of the three columns to see if that will make IE work. No go… Also looked at links, elements, etc. to see if one was overly long. I’ve just started the blog, so there isn’t much to check. Can anyone see something in my body CSS that might be causing this? Again, FF displays all three columns.
I’m having a problem with my menu dropping to bottom of content section. This happens when I “float: left;” the lefthand menu in a 3-col format. When I use “position: absolute; for the menu, it works in Firefox but not in IE. Here’s the CSS for my BODY & PAGE LAYOUT:

body {
font-size: 14px;
line-height: 18px;
font-family: Verdana, Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif;
margin: 20px;
}

#rap {
background: #fff url(‘bg1.gif’) repeat-y left;
margin: 0px 200px 0px 0px;
border-bottom: 0;
text-align: left; /* IE 5.5 hack part II */
}

#masthead {
background: #90a090;
border-bottom: double 3px #aba;
font: italic normal 100% ‘Times New Roman’, Times, serif;
letter-spacing: 0.2em;
margin: 0;
padding: 15px 10px 15px 60px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #565;
}

#main {
backgound: #fff;
margin-left: 225px;
top: 155px;
width: 280px;
border: 1px solid #000;
height: 100%;
}

#content {
float: left;
width: 280px;
}

#menu {
background: #fff;
float: left;
left: 20px;
border: 1px solid #000;
width: 125px;
}

#rmenu {
background: #fff;
position: absolute;
right: 250px;
top: 135px;
border: 1px solid #000;
width: 185px;
}

.clearer {
clear: both;
height: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

#footer {
margin-bottom: 0;

Hey all, I have a 3 col WP blog (several actually) and if you surround the two left hand columns with a container div, then use a margin to push the right column over to where it’s supposed to be it seems to work all right in most modern browsers.

You can see examples of the two different layouts I use at these sites: https://bloglogic.net and https://selfhelpdaily.com

Feel free to have a look at the css to get an idea of how you can implement it on your own sites if you like, but please don’t just lift the entire thing ??

My heart always sinks when I see guys who have taken a robust and well proven template and then *modified* it. That is fine. But to then describe their efforts as *overcoming the problems* is a bit much. Out of the box Trident is rock solid both for 1.2 and in Neuros 1.5 port. If people hack it about – like anything – it will break. I would add a bit more. *Modifying* templates takes as much knowledge – if not more – than building them in the first place. And by those standards the CSS which has been posted – unnecessarily – here in the forum is a mess. It is completely unrecognisable from the original.

@pomodoro,
did you see the Vesuvius for WP 1.5?

Thanks, Moshu. The Vesuvius theme is a lot closer to what I was seeking. Sorry to have cluttered up the forum with my messy CSS. How else does one learn?

Well the thing is that we can all find your CSS from your file anyway. Not only does it make the forum *untidy* but due to the cascading nature of CSS it is quite common for folk to omit the selector that is in fact controlling the style. Glad you got fixed up. Vesuvius also has a fine pedigree. *Cough*. ??

Hello Pomodoro

I am sorry I did not respond yet.
It is not that difficult at all to get three columns there are actually several ways and many designs.
But I understand you are also interested in the code.
Just view the page source there you also will find where the CSS file is located.
Download the CSS file.
There is only one thing everything is still under design !
And I also make use of several layouts so you will see a lot of code also some code maybe pointing to nowhere.
So you are warned !
When everything later completely is adapted to WordPress I will release it for all of them who are interested in it.
Also there will be descriptions inside basic files index.php and style.css etc..
Just because that makes things easier for people to change colours and or pictures and so on.
Lorelle by the way is a master in pointing you to websites with lots of learning topics.
Do not hesitate to ask her help.

In the meantime I encourage you and others to experiment with the rough code.
Because I am also busy with other websites it can take a litlle while before releasing but we never know maybe someone else is faster or has better ideas.