marcy

There’s a plugin that allows you to customize excerpts more — check out the_excerpt Reloaded and see if that might help.

Really? Drat. I don’t really know anything about plugins, but it just seemed logical to take the collapsible part and add it to the excerpt thing.

What about this?

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/59381

If you only want it to affect the one page, maybe you could make a special page template; comment out those template tags in the special template, use the special template for that one page, and everything else should be unaffected.

I looked at the page source, and you’re using a table with one row and one cell inside a div called “post.” Much better to use CSS to assign background for the post div, instead of adding a table in there.

I suggest you learn about CSS from any basic tutorial you can find online — CSS doesn’t have to be complicated, especially when you already have most of your layout created by your WP theme. You only have to learn enough to tweak it a little.

Example could be, in your style sheet:

.post
{
background-color: #ffffff;
}

This would make the post background white.

You’d have to set your content widths to something relative — a percentage instead of a number.

I tried working up a variable width theme and decided there were far too many problems because of images and browser differences. I’d suggest that you either use thumbnails or small images with links to the larger version, or else set your widths to accommodate the widest images you plan to use.

For your particular example, I think that image would still be effective resized small enough to fit in your existing content column.

EDIT — there’s another option — look up “overflow” in a CSS tutorial. You could set your image overflow to show even though the content box wouldn’t expand.

It’s not “best practice” to use tables for layout purposes. Your WP theme should be set up already with its own layout via CSS. If you want it to be laid out differently, you’ll have to go searching for another theme or try changing the one you’ve got.

Without a link to your site, folks can’t go look and see what kinds of problems you’re having.

Kassad,

Thanks for the MoTown link — sounds like it will be a good idea, but it’ll have to wait until I have some big chunks of time to try to make it look like my existing layout.

I think I understand what you’re talking about with the theme switcher and the focus problem. I’m not sure I’d want to mess with tabindex or a left sidebar, because I think content should come first. A regular visitor would only need to set the theme once, and in subsequent visits I think they would be more interested in visiting post links or making comments than in switching themes again.

I think I understand your theme link list idea — it seems like something obvious I should have thought of. I don’t mind it not being drop-down because I don’t have that many themes.

I went to your workshop site, and I didn’t see the theme links anywhere, though.

About themes vs. styles — I really only use the theme switcher to address the variable width problem — I currently have one version of my theme designed for 800×600 res, and another for 1024×768. I’ve thought about adding larger and smaller versions, too.

If I could do all that by switching styles instead of themes, that would be nicer — after all, the only differences (I think) are in the CSS.

And then there’s the monthly archive plugin, found here: https://www.oneofthosedays.org.uk/projects/plugin-archives

I understand tables can be a problem for some browsers — maybe it’s as simple as adding some alt text or something? –Okay, that seemed too simple so I looked it up and found out about WAVE
https://www.wave.webaim.org/index.jsp
which is an accessibility validation tool. Looks like this plugin is a properly set up data table and not a problem for accessibility.

On the other hand, I found out I need form labels.

I do wonder why the plugin puts a list of all the monthly archive links in the head of the document…

Gotta go make dinner now…

That’s interesting — I also use FF but don’t have any extensions running. I wonder what’s going on there — hope you figure it out!

The only difference I can see between the two posts is this bit of code that I don’t understand:


<div id="Clipmarks215BorderDiv1426" style="border: 2px solid orange; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: absolute; width: 0px; display: none; z-index: 99999" />
<div id="Clipmarks35BorderDiv8843" style="border: 2px solid orange; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: absolute; width: 0px; display: none; z-index: 99999" />
<div id="Clipmarks804BorderDiv4802" style="border: 2px solid orange; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: absolute; height: 0px; display: none; z-index: 99999" />
<div id="Clipmarks624BorderDiv5571" style="border: 2px solid orange; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; position: absolute; height: 0px; display: none; z-index: 99999" />


What is that supposed to be doing?

If you try another post without that part, does it work?

LordJezo, you’ve got two of those “post info” <div> thingies — one for the post title and all, then another one underneath each post. Try deleting that extra one, or taking out the class “post info” name for that one, or creating a new class for it.

mjh, have you tried the background color idea?

It’s because you’re using a partially variable width theme. Everything is variable width except the posts, so when the resolution or window size changes, everything gets scrunched up under the posts.

See Urban Giraffe https://www.urbangiraffe.com/2005/04/22/themeguide2/

for some ways to work with variable width.

Or, switch to a theme with a fixed width.

Or, do what I did — I created two versions of my theme, one set for 800×600 and one set for 1024×768, then installed the theme switcher plugin to allow folks to choose.

Probably what you’d look to change (in the stylesheet) is the padding and / or margins for one or more of these classes: post, storycontent, postmetadata. An easy way to decide which one you need to change is to temporarily assign each a different background color so you can see the “box” each one makes.

Consider getting “the_excerpt reloaded” plugin. It allows you to customize what kinds of HTML tags are allowed in the excerpts, which are displayed on the archives / categories pages.

https://guff.szub.net/2005/02/26/the-excerpt-reloaded/

Looking at your source, I noticed two <div> items under each post. One is a class called post-info, one called post-footer. Try deleting one or both. I’d look in the main index, page, post, and single post templates. Alternatively, change the style of those classes in the style template. Of course backup anything before making changes, just in case you want it back the way it was.