Sidebar flipping to other side bottom

When you use a font in any web page, that font will only display correctly if it resides on the computer it’s being viewed on. Your older computers probably do not have that font or vice-versa.

Try the W3C Markup Validation Service to see if there are errors in your code (like a missing div tag)

If you decide to write your own theme, the next step after you break your page into sections is to make copies of your index.php named archive.php, page.php, and single.php so you can control the look of those pages individually.

Then copy all of the code from the Default theme’s single.php and page.php from right after where the content is called in up to the content’s </div> tag. That will make your theme able to accept comments and trackbacks.

You may also want to edit archive.php to display the_excerpt instead of the_content

never heard of a sandbox theme. I actually don’t recommend that because it’s so far from what you want to end up with

that cracked me up…

you have sort of a unique way of writing themes but I can see the simplicity of it – especially for folks just getting started doing it

you should log in to the codex and create a page discussing this approach; maybe expounding a bit here and there
could be beneficial to some

Oops I forgot to mention that to make comments work you also have to copy the Default theme’s comments.php and comments-popup.php into your theme folder and change the comments at the top.

For your alignment problem, a simple trick is to assign a different background color to each of your divs so that you can see if they are overlapping, too wide, not displaying the way you thought they would, etc.

@samboll Yes I guess it is ironic that I would say the sandbox is far from what you want to end up with and then suggest starting out with essentially nothing.

This is not how I usually write a theme but I did resort to doing it this way on a theme design that I was having trouble with. I found that removing all of the WordPress code and just putting dummy text into each area helped me to resolve a basic CSS layout problem.

I will try to re-organize my thoughts above into a post that people can use as a reference. It’s a simple way to create a custom theme without really knowing very much about how WordPress works. All of the WP stuff can be done w/ copy & paste.

I’m tweaking the default site and have lost the sidebar on the right side after just refreshing in Firefox only. I can go to Internet Explorer and see what the other computers in the house can see. This is whack! Do you think I’ve tripped something in Firefox, creating these problems? Come to think of it, the other day I updated Firefox with 3 rows of windows open, could this be “fall out”? By the way after going through the css I found the easy Header updater … wish I’d found that sooner … what a BREEZE. Anything like that for the footer? :^)

It’s hard to say what you’ve got going on there but it’s safe to say that if the site worked before you tweaked it but not after, it must be something you did.

No doubt! Thanks for pointing that out. :^) If either of you gentlemen could take a quick look at my site thus far, I’m starting to bog down as I work within the sidebar.php (maybe I’m in the wrong place?) trying to remove the “Search box”, the “January 2010” & “Pink Handbags(1)” and pushing that “2010 Pink Purses.org” back down into the middle of the footer. Right now I’m still making changes in Foxfire, but checking the site in IE … hope what I’m seeing is what it is. Thanks again for all of your help and suggestions! I really appreciate being able to pick your brains.

Probably a dumb question, but can I use an editor like Alleycode, capture the source code for my site, edit out what I don’t want and then FTP the revised code up to my site? Maybe FTP it into the wp content or wp admin?
Just looking for an easier way. Or would that create problems?

If all you want to do is control what does or does not show up in the sidebar, why not just use widgets?

You can edit your theme files offline in an HTML editor. They are in the wp-content/themes folder. Make a backup copy before you make any changes. Apparently in Dreamweaver you can display your whole site off-line but I have never tried that. I always tell people to be careful what dreams they weave. There is also a pretty handy add-on for Firefox called Firebug, which lets you display and alter the code on your web site. You can see your changes on the screen, which is pretty cool. It doesn’t actually alter the code of your site but it is handy for helping to debug code.

Thanks SS. Actually, I have my sidebar looking just the way I want it to with one exception … under my “pink Resources” the links are blue and I’m hoping that I can change the color to one more fitting for the site. Do you think I’d be able to use Firebug for that or would that be something I’d need to go into my style sheet.css and change the code for?

You have to change it in style.css. Firebug does not change your code. It just lets you see how your site would look if you change your code and it has some debugging features that can help you find problems in your code.

I’ve been up and down the style sheet changing the color codes to see if I could get the links to change, to no avail. Is there a way to place code in there and create links that I can add color to “simply”? Also, in an attempt to change the color of the text in my footer, I was able to find the footer background color code, but was unsuccessful … maybe it’s tied to something else that also needs to be changed. I never saw where I could change the “text color code” per say. Thanks for your suggestions, though.