Archive for In the Studio

I’ve been working on a fully fluid-width, XHTML Strict, table-less, three column child theme for WordPress’ Twenty Ten default theme…

And in the process, discovered a bottom margin bug!

I submitted the bug to a Trac ticket HERE and also documented the fix that would squash the bug flat and make Twenty Ten render the way it was supposed to which I will share here in my blog.

The Bug (in short):

The margin-bottom: 20px that is applied to the footer div triggers a well known CSS bug causing the 20px margin to be applied to the adjoining/bottom margin-touching wrapper div instead of the footer div.

That bottom margin you see at the bottom of the page where the end of the content wrapper should be touching the bottom of the screen?

That’s the bug.

The Fix (in short):

To correctly apply the 20px margin-bottom to the footer div and not accidentally to the wrapper div, the wrapper div needs to be given a 1px padding-bottom and the footer div needs to be given a 19px margin-bottom.

The padding applied to the wrapper where it touches the bottom of the footer container will trigger the margin-bottom to be rendered correctly for the footer and not the wrapper as the padding will add some ’separation’ between the two containers.

Another fix is to add a 1px border to the bottom of the wrapper and leave the 20px margin-bottom on the footer.

The border adds ‘content’ to the bottom of the wrapper which triggers the margin-bottom for the footer to be rendered correctly.

Why the Bug Happens:

Read the rest of this page »

It is, it is!

Thanks to AddThis and my print-friendly CSS stylesheet, this blog is officially ‘Print Friendly’!

Remember what I said about the AddThis Printing feature printing out entire blogs instead of specific blog posts?

Well, I found out from the AddThis support team – thanks! – that AddThis has a specific Printing function called Printer Friendly which can enable a specific blog post to be printed out of a whole page of blog posts given the proper setup.

If you click on the ‘Share’ button at the bottom of this post, you will notice a Print Friendly option. If you click it, it will open up the blog post the button is associated with in a new viewing window/tab and will allow you to print that one post rather than doing the default ‘Print Whole Web Page’ function.

Pretty neat, huh?

At least… I think so!

Thanks again AddThis team; I really appreciate the tip and I’m really glad you implemented the Print Friendly functionality!

~ EMG

After my last Bulletin Board update, I think my Bulletin Board is going a bit… overboard.

I initially created the Bulletin Board post to serve as… well… a bulletin board for people to catch up on the most recent administrative updates without having to dig through my blog.

I still like the idea, but…

Look at how long the Bulletin Board post is getting!

I don’t want it to take up a third of my blog page, but that’s exactly what it is doing. On the other hand, I also still want to serve up my most recent administrative updates all in one post block area.

Ideas?

One of the more feasible/do-able ideas I was considering is to code a WordPress-specific PHP loop that would list posts from my Administration category and then display the list in the block that I currently label as Bulletin Board.

This would offer visitors to my site a listing of all the most current administrative posts while also cleaning up some textual clutter.

The downside would be the necessity to alter a theme file in order to insert such a post as the Sticky Post I am using now would be replaced with a permanent ‘post’ that posts according to a PHP loop.

Hmmm…

~ EMG

… is it…?

Over here it sure isn’t!

So after a few long months of having very empty Rabbit Hole and Giving Props widgets staring at me in the face asking me, “Why haven’t you worked on your links yet?”, I finally sat myself down to wrangle around with them and only them.

Three hours later (actually five, but the first two hours were kinda scattered around)…

Behold – my Giving Props list! *points to the sidebar Giving Props widget block*

What do you think?

The list isn’t fully finished yet as there are a few people and things that I need to add on, but you get the general idea, right?

Maaan, but the list ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be and it also ended up taking up more of my time and concentration than I thought it might!

Initially, the list was going to be a simple list of text-only links like the list of links in a typical Blogroll widget block (to maintain cohesion with the rest of my site which is very minimalistic in terms of graphics), but after thinking about ‘giving back to the community’…

I decided that maybe I could turn my simple Giving Props link block into a personal project to ‘give back’ to the people, services, and places who/that have helped me along my journey as a WordPress junkie, front-end web developer and designer, and blogger.

And that’s where all those icons/buttons come in.

To show my appreciation for these people, services, and places, I ended up creating sixteen – 16 so far! – unique slimline buttons for each and every one of these people, services, and places and boy oh boy, but did I have one heck of a blast doing so or what!

There are still more to come – there are still a few people yet whom I want to put in the list, but haven’t decided on the graphic for – but I think I’m doing good so far.

After I get the others done, I will officially send them off to their ‘owners’ and hopefully, I will hear back from some of the people and get some feedback on what they like or what they don’t like.

*crosses fingers*

… I hope nobody takes offense to what I’ve done.

~ EMG

… to the WordPress community.

So I was reading Andy Peatling’s post on giving back to the community in regards to open source projects (like WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress, etc) and it got me thinking.

How have I given back to the WordPress (and other similar) communities?

Read the rest of this page »

Sharing some (old!) thoughts…

about the ‘ease’ of WordPress theming:

NOTE: This is an excerpt and add-on to an old post of mine that I made in the forums a long while back. The original topic was in regards to people asking for very basic XHTML and CSS help in theming, which prompted a bit of a discussion on how WordPress IS a five minute install, but whose theming is NOT for the complete newbie.

“Well, if WP would make it absolutely clear PRE-installation that in-depth theme customization and/or Theme Development/Design is best left to the savvy front-end web developers or, at the very least, to the people who have -some- sort of front-end knowledge, then maybe there wouldn’t be so many people flocking to the forums with the ‘Help me theme my WP because I don’t understand CSS or XHTML!’ issues?

Just a thought?

The impression I’m getting is that everyone ELSE is getting the impression that WP is easy-peasy to custom theme by oneself when it isn’t easy-peasy without having at least some working knowledge of what goes into WP theming.

For the record, I like WP how it is and have no complaints myself, but I actually do front-end stuff and what appealed to me the most was the ability for me to dig into WordPress on my own and make it my own.“

EDIT 1: And it would seem that Bob Dunn at Cat’s Eye shares similar sentiments on WordPress being an ‘answer to all our prayers’. Have a look HERE!

EDIT 2: I will clarify my own thoughts in a later post.

~ EMG