ikiru

I don’t know of any theme that pulls posts from two different blogs (installations of WordPress) or two different databases. But then, from the sound of what you’re trying to do, that’s not really the best solution for your problem.

The way I’d solve your problem (at least within the WordPress framework) is by using two categories, or perhaps custom fields. For example, have two categories on your blog (i.e. Pro and Con) and display posts from the Pro category on one side and from the Anti side on the other. (You could do the same thing with either tags or a custom field.)

If that doesn’t quite make sense, my personal homepage at davidbhayes.com might actually help you see what I’m saying. That page aggregates the things I write at multiple blogs, puts them into categories (based on the blog they’re from), and then uses the categories to determine what’s displayed where.

I know of no publicly available theme that does this for you (far too small a market for someone to build one), but there are a number of tutorials about using categories to display multiple columns of content with WordPress.

I’m not sure that’s the answer you’re looking for, but I hope it helps.

I’m not familiar with this theme or it’s designer, but it seems a little sloppy. This, for example, looks bad:

<h1 class="storytitle" id="post-9"><a href="https://nerdette.co.uk/blog/?p=9" rel="bookmark">Coming along</a></h1></div>

There you have what seems to me to be an errant </div> which appears to be causing your border problem. (Unless that’s meant to close the nameless div that appears to be intended to surround each post. In which case, it’s doing that but the elements of the post are no longer bound together).

Removing that </div> should fix your issue with the border.

The image issue is a little more confusing. The simplest solution is just to make sure that your post is always long enough to flow around any picture you have in a post.

Barring that, you could add a clear: left CSS element to your feedback class. That would usually make the element stay below anything that might be to the left of it but above it in the code.

That doesn’t quite work with your theme, because the #content element isn’t floated. But if you change the margin line which looks like this:

#content {
	margin:10px 0 0 155px;
}

to look like this this:

#content {
  float: left;
  margin:10px 0 0 5px;
}

You should have your second post well below the first.

Wow that took a while! Hope that fixes your problems.

I just viewed the link titled “Website” in Opera (9.24) and IE7 and it looks fine to me. Are you referring to a different website or a different theme (the one I saw looked a lot like the WordPress default)?

It would also be useful to know if your sidebar is still on the page somewhere in the browsers. It sounds like a problem of the sidebar div being wrongly placed by the browsers (though I’m surprised Opera and IE made the same error), with the footer floating up to replace it.

Sorry I can’t be of more help.

I’m not sure I understand your problem fully, but two things come to mind. The first is that this sounds like an error that existed for versions of WordPress older than 2.5 on Safari. In that, all your paragraph breaks would disappear from the visual editor and so wouldn’t be displayed right by any theme.

If it’s an issue specific to your theme, it may simply be that your stylesheet is missing either margins or padding around the paragraph (p) element. That would keep your line breaks per se, but leave little space between your paragraphs.

Hope one of those helps. If not, please try to elaborate your problem.

It seems I’m swimming beyond my depth…

I vaguely understand what you’re talking about chaoskaizer, and it seems that you found a very clever way to do what I want, but I have a few questions. I don’t know if you (or anyone else) can answer these, but:

1. Are these “http response headers” coming with the image that the get_avatar function is pointing me to?
2. How were you able to tell which codes (200, 302) mean which behavior?
3. To avoid slowdown, should I put your function in my functions.php file? Or does it go somewhere else?
4. Can I really avoid slowdown? If the process of checking slows things down, won’t it be slow no matter where/how I check?
5. Not sure I understand this: “used Action hook “comment_post” && “edit_post” and store the value somewhere inside %_comments.” Are you saying that I should generate the variable separately (like with your function) and only check the value within the actual template file?

Also, thanks so much for all your help and patience. I didn’t actually know if someone would try to help me, let alone find a solution to my problem. You’re a great asset to the WordPress community, chaoskaizer.

That looks interesting chaoskaizer. Am I wrong in thinking that is a backwards compatible version of the gravatar code?

The problem I’m actually having is that I don’t think there’s any way to tell from the results of get_avatar whether or not it’s returning the default avatar or an avatar that was actually set by a user.

My code currently looks like this:

if (function_exists('get_avatar') && ($avatar_results = get_avatar($comment, $size='16'))) {
  if ($avatar_results == 'default_avatar') {
    echo $comment_count;
  }
  else {
    echo $avatar_results;
  }
} else {
  echo $comment_count;
}

What I need is a way to replace the dummy if (avatar_results == 'default avatar') line with a real check to see if it is a default avatar. But I’m increasingly thinking that there’s no good way to do this and I should should stop trying to find it.

Thanks for in info, Otto. Very good to know.

But in this case I think I may actually want to check separately so I can say “If function exists and is enabled, do X, else, do Y.” It’s only at X that I want to try to actually get the avatar. (And hopefully do Z if the avatar returned is blank).

I can’t think of a logical way to make this any shorter in light of the new information. Is there something I’m missing?

Thanks for the help chaoskaizer. I feel a little embarrassed that I forgot about using get_option for checking that avatars are on.

That said, I’m still lacking a good solution to the “If avatar is empty show something else” problem. I should have made clear in the original question that I’m not looking to show an image if the commenter has no avatar, but a text string.

The best thing I’ve thought of for this purpose is to check what’s returned against what I know an empty return should look like. Aside from seeming a little inelegant, I’m not sure my PHP’s up to that.

Off to tinker, I suppose…

A few obvious possibilities:

• People haven’t realized that there is now a centralized place that can upload themes.
• People no longer want a centralized place they can upload themes. (Or something about the specific implementation here has turned them off.)
• People haven’t yet gotten around to uploading their themes.
• And the most likely: Themes that have been uploaded haven’t yet been approved. (Since I believe they’re human reviewed, and it is still the weekend and all).