steveftr

Ah– I found it (the answer to my question about color specifications above). Aside from Gray Whale’s style.css file, there exist some color specs in gray-whale/inc/custom-header.php

Basilosaur_us, I apologize for “messing with” your beautiful theme, but in my defense I can just say that I’m a habitual tinkerer. To me, tweaking some theme or programming code to customize it to my liking (or merely to my momentary whim) is a kind of fun. ??

Well, after you mentioned that negative values are valid for margins, I did some research and stand corrected! In fact, negative margin values seem to have some interesting uses. Hopefully all the commonly used web-browser rendering engines understand and respond to them.

I believe I can now answer my own question above.

Each theme may set its own requirements for the sizes and aspect ratios for scaled or cropped versions of images that are uploaded, and those different sizes (such as thumbnails) are generated automatically in the background without user interaction or knowledge.

Because the different-size versions of uploaded images are determined by the settings of the theme, any images uploaded while a person was using a different theme may have different alternate sizes that were generated for that particular theme.

In the case of the glass Venus Flytrap I mentioned above, it was uploaded while I was using a different theme (before I discovered Gray Whale). Once I deleted that image, and then reuploaded it under Gray Whale, a cropped and scaled version of the full-size image was created automatically to fit the specifications of Gray Whale’s portfolio-view page, which looks fine now.

I love Gray Whale’s portfolio view template, but am curious as to how and when Gray Whale crops and scales the featured images of child pages of the portfolio-view page.

I created two blog-type pages (not WP posts, but pages) so far and set them both as having the page created with the portfolio-view template as parent. The result can be seen here–

a Gray Whale portfolio view page

When I added the clock photo as featured image for one of the child pages, Gray Whale (or WordPress) cropped and scaled the image to a size suitable for the area in which it would be displayed on the Gray Whale portfolio page. But the other image, of a glass Venus Flytrap, was not automatically cropped or scaled, so I just wondered why that occurred and what criteria triggers the crop/scale process.

Beautiful theme–

Oh. Thank you for the explanation. I need a simple contact form, so I’ll install Contact Form 7 to use with Gray Whale.

I looked at the Gray Whale CSS (style.css) and commented out (used /* */) two items in Section 5.2, Menus, that looked vaguely “suspicious” to me– ??

in the .main-navigation block:

/*	line-height: .95em; */

and in the .main-navigation li block:

/*	margin-bottom: -2px; */

These two changes seem to have remedied the sporadic problem where the submenu would become discontinuous with the main menu items (the parent items of the submenu items) causing the submenu to disappear as soon as one’s mouse pointer moved below the bottom margin of the main menu into the space between it and the submenu.

However, it remedies the problem by moving the submenu upward a tiny amount to overlap the main (parent) menu just slightly, regardless of Javascript text reflowing that occurs as a response to changes made in the viewport size (on a desktop computer using a browser window).

As a note, I didn’t know that negative values were allowed for margins; I would think that the “-2px” specification for the margin-bottom would not be valid CSS; just wondering–

Thank you for the explanation, basilosaur_us. I did what you suggested and in the “Widgets” section under “Appearance” in the WP backend, I added a “Custom Menu” widget to Gray Whale’s “Mobile Menu” location, specified the primary menu I had already created for the site (rather than create another menu), and the menu button and its associated menu work great in small viewport sizes and devices.

Thanks.

If you look at it in a larger window, Gray Whale will give you slightly larger text.

Yes, that’s one of the many thoughtful design features I like about Gray Whale.

The “disappearing submenu” issue is very sporadic and happens in only some contexts and conditions, including: size of viewport, font size and different fonts (if a visitor specifies in his web browser’s preferences his own fonts be used instead of those mandated by the CSS), changing font size, the way the dropdown menu is achieved in CSS (moved far off the page until visible parent item is hovered over, or using the CSS directive “display: none” and then “display: block” on hover, using relative or absolute measurements for submenu blocks or font line-height or list items that don’t quite match up under certain circumstances, or any of many other possibilities.

I may look at the Gray Whale CSS myself to see if I can find anything that might influence this occasional anomalous behavior.

Thanks for adding a way to donate for your fine work at Gray Whale’s own webpage.

I was going to report the same problem when I was using Gray Whale version 1.0. After downloading and installing the latest update (version 1.0.1, available at the developer’s own page here at www.ads-software.com) I haven’t been able to duplicate the problem, although I have no idea whether the update addressed the problem with the mobile-device menu button (a nice viewport-size responsive feature, minimizing the entire menu to just one button).

Anyway, you might want to try the updated version of Gray Whale and see if it helps.

Gray Whale is still listed at version 1.0 (Download link is for v1.0 in zip file). Perhaps it takes a few days for the www.ads-software.com crew to post the updated Gray Whale 1.0.1.

Thanks again for this very nice WP theme.

Looking forward to trying the Gray Whale update when it’s available. Thank you very much.

In addition, this plugin, which I likewise think is great, raises another error using the W3C validator. Simple Basic Contact Form places a style element within the body element of the webpage. Style elements are valid only in the head element of a webpage; in the body, all style declarations are to be specified in the optional style attribute of a valid body element.

For example, the following, which Simple Basic Contact Form does, is invalid–

<div id="simple-contact-form>
   (the form fieldsets, labels and inputs)
</div>

<style>
   #simple-contact-form fieldset {
      width: 100%; overflow: hidden;
   }
</style>

The style declarations should instead be specified in the “style” attribute of a particular HTML element, like this–

<div id="simple-contact-form>
(...)
<fieldset style="width: 100%; overflow: hidden;"> (...) </fieldset>
(...)
</div>

Thank you Michael Mann for mentioning this–

Make sure you clear out the browsers cache, close the browser, open it back up and re-check.

I was frustrated at not being able to figure out, after editing several redirects in Simple 301 Redirects, if the mistake was mine (and what it was) or the plugin’s (it was not the plugin).

Thanks for helping others.

Sorry to waste your time, it was just me putting the destination url in wrong

Really? How so? My redirections are going to my homepage instead of the designated redirect-URL too. You won’t have wasted other people’s time if you are willing to share what you learned. ??

The WordPress editor for pages or posts has two tabs, for two different editor views, visual and text. In the TEXT editor, you can insert a “read more” tag into a post using the following HTML-comment type code–

<!--more-->

For more information about customizing the read-more functionality in WordPress, the following webpage will help–

Customizing the Read More

—