lhk

Hi again,

short answer – no for that one I’m not paid ?? It’s a friend’s site. A good friend, who’s herself an artist and has a pretty precise idea of what she wants ;-} and she knows little enough of markup and webdesign to expect me to do it “just so”…

Basically the following problems exist or persist (as you wish ;-)):

– Basic layout should be like in Laila (basic as in what goes where)

– we are rooting for two variants: a photo/colored one, or a drawings/stark-b/w one.

The colored one can be easily done with Laila practically as is (except for the non-matching column lengths which bug me personally). It’s done (except for the box lengths) and looks quite ok so far.

The drawings one needs fine 1px borders around certain blocks (sidebar, topnav bar, picture insert, main content, footer) with no “doubled” lines.

Now, while I can “construct” this thing in CSS with image backgrounds (nope – to CSS the borders in is not that easy a gimmick, precisely for the differing heights and hacks needed), I’d create havoc with my nerves doing that – while it takes about 10 seconds with plain tabled layout and pronto!, plus it would even nicely display in different browsers.

The only problem I so far have with WP and tables is, that it (WP) doesn’t work. I even had a close look at Bionic Jive which truly didn’t help me much.

Probably I’m just dense, I dropped the WP calls in the relevant table cells with the Loop going in the largest one supposed to hold the posts. The clean table code (without WP tags/calls):

‘<table width=”750″ border=”1″ cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ bordercolor=”#000000″>
<tr valign=”top”>
<td colspan=”2″></td>
</tr>
<tr valign=”top”>
<td height=”170″></td>
<td rowspan=”2″ width=”250″></td>
</tr>
<tr valign=”top”>
<td width=”500″></td>
</tr>
<tr valign=”top”>
<td colspan=”2″></td>
</tr>
</table>’

Just looking at it tells you how little markup this is compared to what I’d need to CSS that. ??

It’s for such things that I find myself saying “why the heck should I use CSS if I can solve things so easily?” and “F..k the anti-table fraction”.

??

I like CSS, I’m certainly not anti-CSS, but I’m no purity fanatic, I’m a down to earth practical realist.

And just to insert an (concededly very small) edge into the “table is over and not for design” debate I watch going on these days: THIS is as much tabular data as pure lists are. The design this intends to achieve is straight from the hard cover (comic strip) sheaf page that the content (for that blog) is drawn on. I see absolutely no single valid reason not to use the same table the artist draws with ruler and inkpen on the webpage.

??

Back to the problem. I’d love to use this table for this theme variant. It’s easy, clean and elegant. But I can’t get WP to function inside it. As I said, I’m probably too dense to wrap my brain about what WP code needs to go where with such a table.

Hi,

actually I would have preferred not to re-write the complete Laila theme ?? And if I have to do a re-write, I’d prefer a quick and dirty solution. That’s part of the (my) problem.

Anyone know of a successful tabled WP layout?

Hi,

as Laila has clear space above and below the wrapper, simple faux columns wouldn’t work. The floating faux column trick seems to – as I remember – use some of the IE box model hacks. And that’s bound to eventually give a huge headache.

I tried the tabled layout (long while ago, around WP 1.3 or thereabouts) and ran into trouble with The Loop. I simply didn’t get it to work much as I wanted to. Period. Sigh.

So now I wonder whether this still is the case. Actually popping WP elements into a table would solve my design problem in a splitsecond and spare me a huge CSS headache.

It’s truly funny (actually) that as we speak CSS can’t lick the most simple tricks in basic structure. Compared to the hoop jumps one has to execute when wanting a very simple linear CSS layout which at the same time is cross-browser compatible, CSS creates more complicated markup than tables.

Oh well, my side of the planet it’s still early early morning… a coffee and I retry that tabled layout…

Hi again,

what about IE 7.0? I’m told it will break quite some hacks.

And actually asking those who dabbled with a tabled WP layout: did anyone ever get that to work across table cells?

Hi again,

https://cinila.com/journal/2006/03/15/laila-butterfly-themes-for-wordpress/

or (found between posts)

https://orangescale.com/more/demo/laila-wp/

The new Laila theme does some of what I want, but to me looks “less” attractive than the older version.

The one major question still for me is the column thing.

Hi moshu,

1. Hmm, yee-ee-ah? Not sure.

2. Thanks, that’s what I needed

3. Tried that, but it doesn’t really help. There’s “whitespace” I can’t pinpoint. But I’ll ask the theme developer about that.

Unfortunately I can’t post the blog address, it’s in dev and expressly not to be shown as per client’s decision.

Greetings

LHK

Hi,

I can understand Ladydelaluna’s reaction. I backpedal QUICKLY out of ANY site having music. It’s instinctive and there’s really no better way to ensure, that no one reads a site than doing this to people.

So, at least try to ensure that the music is OFF when people enter, and that it can be turned on (and OFF again) only by decided will and action of the visitor.

Are you sure you uploaded the .mo file correctly as a binary file?

Hi again,

yes, ladydelaluna – in a nutshell you have it right ??

I can’t “not-use” a WYSIWYG editor. I personally have no problems switching it off, I handcode for ages now. But this can’t be said for the client.

Practically, I want to “dumb down” TinyMCE further, to a point where it handles (and displays!) very few very simple things, like left/right/center and bold.

I noticed that things get a bit better when turning off the XHTML auto-correction, which seems to clash a bit with ImageManager’s code insertions.

Most importantly, I need to find a way to autoinsert a pre-configured table which the client simply can fill with text. I’ve hunted but so far haven’t found a way to adjust TinyMCE as is possible e.g. with Quicktags.

Hi again,

everything is ok with FF and a PC. With IE everything is ok with a fully opened window, when using a partially open window the sidebar did jump downwards.

I assume you’re using a Kubrick derivate? I remember someone else having that problem. Maybe you should do a search for “Kubrick sidebar”. It’s probably just a width/positioning problem.

Hi,

I don’t see anything “goofy”. The one criticism I’d have is the much too rich blue tone in the header photo when juxtaposed to the nicely neutral general colorset of the blog. I’d tone and grey that down a bit.

Anyone?

I found the solution myself. It has to do with the theme and whether or not it sets a value for this send button. Red Train does not. So the solution was adding “value=”senden””.

Hi,

there are various scripts to disable hotlinking. You can do a Google search for that.

If you’ve a host who provides you with CPanel, there’s one script which is part of CPanel with which you can stop hotlinking with a few mouseclicks.

What you should do anyway is putting an empty index.html page into every folder, which stops people from calling up the directory index of the folders.

Hi jbsprague,

thanks for the tip, I’ll be looking into this.