EMG

… Why not just use Pages to do the same thing?

Pages allow you to display a single page/post of static content rather than dynamic content and there are a few ways to display links to these pages (using the Pages widget or simply adding a Pages navigation/link block in your sidebar/navigation bar area).

(Sorry for the wait; my browser unexpectedly crashed after viewing someone else’s blog.)

Without looking at the template itself I can’t be positive, but it seems like the link to the Subscribe is potentially hard-coded into the Header template itself (provided that the navigation strip/bar is in the Header file and not in the Main Index or elsewhere).

If that is the case, then you will need to go into the Theme Editor and open up the header template and edit out the link and coding that goes with it.

The Subscribe page seems like it might be a template page as well or at the very least, another file included in with your theme. Are there any extra pages or files in your theme folder?

Can you please post a link to your blog so we can see exactly what you’re talking about? ??

I just went to download the Branford Magazine theme only to have my browser freeze, my AVG antivirus to kick in, and my browser to then close.

Interestingly enough, the Branford Magazine site (the one I went to anyways) had a ‘Gambling’ link on one of its tabs.

… If you have another better link from where I can download the theme, please post it, otherwise I’m not touching that theme with a 10 foot virtual pole.

It could well be a few things going on.

Do you have a float? Did you specify text-align and your margins?

Actually, there are a few journalistic-themed WP themes out there. ??

Here are a few you might be interested in: Blix, Contempt, DePo Masthead, Fleur De Lys, Jentri, Quentin, and The Journalist.

If you open up the different template files that come with each theme, you can see both the php and XHTML and occasional CSS styling used to build the theme.

If you open up the Stylesheet (style.css usually), you can see how the styling is done.

Your google-ad id repeats itself a few times in your theme. You need to class it, not id it if you want to use it more than once.

Also, if you’re talking about white space in terms of margin spaces, IE automatically renders margins, floats, and the like a bit differently than Firefox does.

What you’re seeing is probably IE’s tendency to expand blocks of content or both IE and Firefox’s problem with collapsing margins.

Where would you like to post an image on your blog? Do you mean a header image/banner that stretches across the top of the page perhaps?

I would like to chime in and say that I have observed similarly to what whooami posted about the userbase of WP vs the userbase of phpBB.

phpBB is a bulletin board/forum system and its whole purpose is to cater to groups and communities. It’s amazing what people can do with phpBB and other BB systems from setting up role-playing communities to support forums to entire websites.

WP, on the other hand, is a more single user-centric application and it seems that the greater majority of users utilize WP to set up personal or business blog sites and single-user websites.

When you compare phpBB to WP in this way, you can see how phpBB’s support system might be stronger if only because of the nature of phpBB and the types of people and types of projects it attracts.

Community vs single-user.

Share vs keep to oneself.

In my opinion, the more personalized single-user nature of WP invokes possessiveness over code and design which can translate over to less willingness to offer support from some users because there is fear of other users copying what they do.

This is an issue I have noticed specifically in the design and front-end department of web development (and WP falls into this category on a lot of levels, especially when talking about theming), but phpBB and other similar systems seem to escape this mentality more due to the community nature of the application itself.

Also, the solitary non-community nature of the WP application in itself means that a lot of people come in, get help, maybe offer some help, and when their WP project is done with, leave.

I’ve used WP for a few years now and I admit to being guilty of coming and going. Not because I don’t want to stay and help, but simply because once a WP project is finished, it is usually finished for good and my attention is being focused elsewhere due to a change in project.

With all that said, I feel that it is a bit unfair to compare phpBB to WP in terms of support.

Something I DO feel that contributes to a potential issue with WP support (lots of people posting the same support questions/issues and sometimes getting slower answers because it’s an old repeated question, for example), however, is that I think a lot of users install WP with hopes to theme on their own… only to find out LATER that in order to successfully theme WP, it is almost a requirement that they have an extensive knowledge of XHTML and CSS and can at least read php.

I have seen before that a lot of users show up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed – all eager to learn how to theme WP – and end up leaving looking like they were hunted by bloodhounds because they realize that without extensive knowledge, they can’t make WP do what they want it to do or look how they want it to look.

It’s a shame for that to happen, I think, because WP is a wonderfully flexible application/platform to work off of and presents to the user a canvas that allows the user full control of both content publishing and content presentation while being completely usable with the majority of features intact upon first install.

Personally speaking, I have seen some great support in the forums for WP, but if there was one thing I had to address, it would be the issue I described above.

What do you mean by ‘there’s no sidebar display info’ in IE?

I just viewed your site in both IE6 and Firefox 2.X and the sidebar and its contents seem to display fine in both?

You can leave comments/the comment feature is available if you click on each individual entry. The reason you can’t see your comments on your main page is because you don’t have the comments code bit inserted/the comments code was not implemented into the main page (or the archives page).

Before this topic is ‘resolved’, may I ask if this whole copying and pasting from MS Word problem is limited to only if the user copies and pastes to the Visual Editor?

I have copied and pasted from MS Word into my WP post, but have not had the same problem. Is it because I disabled the Visual Editor and therefore all the text got pasted in without any formatting?

Okay, whooami, I fixed both the doctype issue and the wonkiness in the layout in IE6. ??

I’m going to work on the Search function page (hadn’t worked on it yet and quite frankly, somehow forgot to – whoops!) but before I do that, I just wanted to address something that you mentioned earlier about accommodating IE6 users.

My theme looking a mess in IE6 when you looked at it last is not meant to be a (complete) reflection of my opinions on the IE6 browser or the people who use it.

I actually still use that version myself and so before I made my list style edits and gravatar image testing (that’s the square image on each of my posts), the layout worked and flowed fine in IE6 with the exception of Mozilla’s rounded corners and the fact that there is no margin space between the footer and the end of the page.

This issue of IE6 optimization in terms of designing graphics is actually one that I have struggled with ever since I’ve done front-end web stuff and alpha transparencies were supported in other browsers but not in IE.

The graphics can be optimized to display more decently on IE6, but at a cost to both quality and effect across all other browsers.

Effects like anti-aliasing, glowing, drop-shadowing against a transparent background all tend to invoke the use of alpha transparencies rather than just index transparencies.

If your objects in question are rounded rather than squared and have no background or are to be placed upon a busy background that isn’t a solid color, the transparent background becomes an issue as to show the transparency involves using index or alpha transparencies.

Being that the effects that most people want – especially with the whole rounded corners thing – is for the graphic to look seamless in its color transitions (especially when using gradients) and for there to not be any stray pixeling, it is almost inevitable, then, that the graphics will have to be of the png format with the alpha transparencies.

And so, the designer and front-end person is caught in a catch-22 if the use of transparencies is inarguable.

Degrade the image across all browsers (if that is even possible as it depends on the type of graphic that is requested of them to make)?

Try to not use transparencies? A lot of designers I know end up using image maps and fixed widths for example, to ensure that non-transparent images will fit where they should and ONLY where they should. For my site, for example, I have images that move across the screen depending on the size of the viewer’s monitor. Without the use of transparencies, the images would block out various parts of content, as shown in the IE6 version of my site.

Use the whole AlphaImageLoader bit and make the CSS invalid and potentially create problems for other IE users who have upgraded browsers?

Simply use the transparencies and leave a warning to IE6 users that some images may not display properly?

It’s not an easy fix when one’s boss wants an image in its full glory to be rounded and displayed in the middle of a busy/color conflicting background and for it to not look degraded.

For this site, however, I specifically stuck to a grayscale for the majority of it to ensure that I could use the PNG 8 format rather than the PNG 32 because I KNOW there are IE6 users out there – a lot of them, in fact, and even a good majority! – and I’m not THAT much of a stuck-up designer to leave them eating blue-backgrounded dirt.

Give me a few and I’ll have the PNG 8 versions of the images out. ??

Thank you!

I’ll fix the doctype declaration bit; I totally forgot that I had them as I had been switching between XHTML Transitional and Strict when I was laying out my first framework.

Yes, it looks a mess in IE6 because I didn’t bother changing my pngs to gifs or making them png 8 rather than png 32 or adding the alpha transparency coding. However, I hadn’t realized that the sidebar had shifted after my last restructuring. Thanks for catching that!

*goes to fix*