motstudio

It’s the way you post posts that needs to be ‘edited’.

Am I right in saying that you created your post in MS Word and then copied and pasted?

What you need to edit are your posts themselves. How exactly you’ll do that, I don’t know as I don’t copy and paste from MS Word when I write posts.

Try opening up your posts in the WP editor and withOUT using MS Word, rewrite your most recent RSS Feed post and save the file and go to https://www.franklinj.com/blog and view the source and see if you see that green text I was talking about earlier in the RSS Feed post.

Glad I could help!

I’m not Michael, but I think I can help!

You CAN use the same code as before AND follow Michael’s same directions, BUT you need to change the number 56 in:

($post->ID == 56 )

to the number 6!

The reason for this change is because the page number for the password protection changed in your different layouts.

So the new code to insert will be:

if( $post->post_parent == 0 )
{?>
<? if ($post->ID == 6 )
{?>
					<td>
					<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Beboerne</a>
					</td>
<?php } else { ?>
					<td>
					<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
					</td>
	<?php } ?>
<?php } endwhile;
?>

See if that doesn’t fix it.

… Nevermind. I don’t need five more minutes.

If you open up the source code and scroll dooown to your posts, you see a bunch of green text, yeah?

That green text is a ‘leftover’ from copying and pasting content from MS Word to TinyMCE to WordPress.

Firefox and Safari and Opera will parse the conditional statements stated in that green text, but IE will not.

So what you’re seeing is IE coughing and refusing to render any more of your site because it can’t get past the conditional statements.

Here’s WP documentation on it that I found: HERE

To fix this problem, might I suggest using a simple text-only file/document editor and learning the markup code necessary to render things like lists and links and such?

Additionally, your images in your list in that RSS Feed post will never show up for anyone except you since you linked to your local computer directory instead of linking to a directory within your website.

There’s a wonderful set of Tools that comes bundled with Firefox called ‘Web Developer Tools’. You can use those to figure out what is what and where is where on your layout.

Also, a good way to start troubleshooting is to validate the code for the site. An attempt to validate your code produced 26 errors and where a lot of them are flash-related, there are several that seem to be hinting at the fact that maybe you forgot to close some tags.

So. Go look at your coding and see if you’ve forgotten to close some tags. Don’t just look at the coding on your theme, though! Look at the coding for your POSTS! Posts get translated into code and if you copied and pasted or typed in bad/garbage coding, you can ‘break’ your theme/layout because of it or even break the functionality of your entire site.

I just opened up the site in IE 5 (wooo! older browser than yours!) and according to IE, besides the fact that your right-hand sidebar fails to load any content, you’ve got yourself one random <!--[endif]--> tag appearing right next to your big RSS icon that’s in your ‘How to Use RSS Feeds’ post.

… Okay. I’m going to take five or ten to read your source code. Quite frankly, it gives me a headache to look at.

You need to clean up your code – especially for such a content-heavy and GUI-heavy site, and BADLY.

I’ll repost again once I’m done reading.

Good. Come back and revive this thread if you’re still having problems. ??

We’re not trying to give you more of a headache, I swear, but in all honesty, if you really want to learn to theme WP on your own, you need a good understanding of how theming works for WP and that includes what makes the theme show up in your Admin theme selector.

… One last question, though:

You said you created customized files and have them all in a folder, yes?

Did you copy pre-existing files from a pre-existing theme or did you actually completely write new files for your theme from scratch?

… Does the sidebar move on the theme’s demo website (if there was a demo website) or in the screenshots of the working theme?

Try this:

– Go into your style.css page and find where it says #header and change it so that it floats right and see what it does.

You currently have your sidebar to float left, you know, and the fact that the sidebar is to your RIGHT tells me that glitchy and/or override coding allows the sidebar to show up on the right hand side in the first place when it should – according to the code – be floatin’ itself to the left.

Change that and see what happens.

I’m not sure if they can help, but I know that I can tell you a few things about what you want to do:

1) What you want – a banner/header with clickable spots that link to places like home, forecast, etc – is called an image map

2) What you need to do to insert the coding from the page that you just linked to, which is:

<img src="/images/general/nes_header.gif" width="820" height="200" border="0" usemap="#Map2" />
<map name="Map2" id="Map2">
  <area shape="rect" coords="481,173,540,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/surfshops.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="743,173,817,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/contact.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="687,173,742,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/media.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="627,173,686,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/surfspots.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="542,173,624,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/surfschools.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="197,173,274,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/surfreports.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="425,173,480,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/links.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="276,173,327,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/cams.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="330,173,423,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/education.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="1,173,50,198" href="https://northeastsurfing.com/" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="51,173,105,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/eventsnews.htm" />
  <area shape="rect" coords="107,173,195,198" href="https://www.northeastsurfing.com/forecast.htm" />
</map>

into where your header image typically would go. Instead of being inserted as a background image where the image map can’t and won’t work, the header image will be an embedded image (like an image that shows up in a post you write) which will allow the header image work as an image map.

3) Because your image map is not terribly complicated (the navigation/link bar is directly underneath and the shapes are all rectangular), I believe that the same effect could be achieved using plain old CSS, which will save both load time and perhaps, additional hassle.

—

Now, how exactly you do #2 depends on a few factors – the most important one being ‘Which theme are you using for your WP site?’

Depending on how the theme author coded for the header to appear, what you’ll have to do to insert your own header where it needs to go will be different.

So.

What theme are you using? Kubrick? Something else? Got a link?

A total spot-on post, moshu.

Completely agree with you on all accounts and then some.

First things first, thank you for clearly tagging your support request.

Second thing is…

How much do you understand CSS, XHTML (heck, HTML), and PHP?

To code a WP theme entirely from scratch is a difficult undertaking for someone who has limited to no background in front-end web development. Even for someone who does have background, theming a WP theme from scratch isn’t entirely the same as doing just front-end web development unless the someone has background in PHP scripting as well and understand WP’s code functions.

In all honesty, being that you can’t figure out the first step, I get the impression that you’re not a front-end web developer.

For this reason, I suggest you save yourself some time and potential headache and browse the different themes available to you and choose the theme that looks and operates the closest to how you want your theme to look and AFTER that, alter the theme to look how you want it to.

And I know for a fact that somewhere around, there IS a WP theme that operates and looks similarly to the site you linked to, SO.

It’s out there!

I agree wholeheartedly with samboll.

I just finished working with the Kubrick theme and will be smart enough to not touch that theme again/use it as a base theme if at all possible. Great theme if you never need to alter it and great functionality, too, if you’re using WP for just simple blogging but YIKES. Not recommended for the first-time WP themer who doesn’t do front-end coding.

To change the header, you need to change this line of coding in the default css:

#header {
	background: #73a0c5 url('images/kubrickheader.jpg') no-repeat bottom center;
	}

Keep the ‘no-repeat’ as it will keep the header image from repeating itself and the ‘bottom’ and ‘center’ will position the header where you need it to be – for example, ‘top center’ or ‘top right’.

… But you also might need to change the PHP coding in the functions.php page if I’m not mistaken because if you don’t, the coding on that page will override any and all changes you might make to the css file or the other php files.

Exactly which line or lines of coding I can’t be sure because when I used Kubrick, I ended up just wiping the functions.php file clean and rewrote my own necessary PHP code that didn’t redundantly spit out basically what my CSS and XHTML was supposed to spit out.

Nooope. Has nothing to do (yet) with being able or unable to understand or code PHP. It has everything to do with how WP identifies themes.

Go back to the link that moshu pointed you to and read down to where it says Theme Style Sheet and read very closely what the instructions say. The fact that you can’t see anything different in your stylesheet and the default one IS the problem.

Ahhhhh ha. I see.

Okay, so you need to make all the theme files writable. You can do this by a few different methods. If you’re not familiar with using FTP to make changes to your files, then download a copy of the Visionary theme to your local computer that you’re using (if you already downloaded a copy, use that copy) and change the file permissions there.

How you do this is going to depend on what operating system you’re using.

For Windows, the easiest way to change file permissions is to right click on the folder that contains the theme and that theme only and click on ‘Properties’ and click on the check mark next to ‘Read Only’ in the ‘Attributes’ section (NOTE: A check mark means that the file IS read-only and NO check mark means that the file is writable) and click on ‘Apply’ and when it asks you if you want to apply the settings to all the files in the folder, click on ‘Yes’.

Once the file permissions are changed so that they are NOT Read-Only, you can reupload this theme to your theme directory and you should be able to edit the theme.

Well, if WP would make it absolutely clear PRE-installation that in-depth theme customization and/or Theme Development 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.

To the OP serenalove:

Yes, you will need to rewrite the CSS code, but in addition, depending on what you want in your second sidebar, you might need to rewrite the PHP coding if you want widgets in that sidebar and you will need to rewrite XHTML as well. If you don’t understand PHP or CSS, doing this on your own will probably be rather difficult to do

For these reasons, I also suggest taking a look at some 3 column layouts, picking one that is closest to how you want your site to work, and then working from there to make it look like how you want it to.

How much of your theme did you alter or modify?

When did this happen and was this happening before?

What was the last thing you did before encountering this problem?

One thing’s for sure – you need to go back and fix some errors in the HTML coding. If you try validating your site (and granted, Kubrick won’t validate too well on its own), you’ll see that there are a bunch of errors in there that need to be fixed.

If everything was working perfectly fine and you posted something and the theme broke, it’s because some garbage coding (I call it garbage because it breaks valid HTML coding) in your post broke the theme.

If everything was working perfectly fine and you altered something in the style.css or ANY of the php files and it broke, then something you altered broke the theme.

If you did absolutely nothing at all and your theme was working fine and suddenly went kaput, then I suggest uninstalling WP and reinstalling WP and seeing if it fixes the problem.

More than likely, though, my hunch is that some ‘garbage’ code is causing the screwup.