Geeklog Forums

I've rebuilt my company web site using Geeklog 1.3.7 because it seemed to provide most of the features I wanted, including a membership registration / security system. Have had a little trouble with themes. I've modified smooth_blue for the default theme, but then found that its use of CSS makes it incompatible with older browsers. Still working on a way around that! Thanks for the great software. Looking forward to 2.0 also. -Tom

Doh! Forgot to give you a link.

Try this: Summit Media Partners

I'm sorry, but who still uses a browser that doesn't understand CSS?

Is your style problem limited to Mac users or simply very old browsers?

The problems with Macs can be resolved by paying attention to the differences between IE for Macs and standard Windows.

If you develop on a Windows machine and your problem is with Mac users, you might consider Topstyle. It can test your style sheet for compliance with several browsers versions across several platforms.

Good question. I don't know, specifically. But I checked the stats from my "old" site before switching over, and about 10% of the people who visited it in the last month were using Netscape 4.x, and those are not compatibile with the particular CSS calls I was using in my theme. So, it's a small percentage, and I could just say "so what" but the truth is that if I were one of those people who visited the site and saw a weird display I might be inclined to blame it on the web site implementor. And as the website implementor, I don't want to lose or turn away 1 in 10 people. (Some of them are prospective customers.) So I should find a more graceful way to deal with it. Perhaps I can check the browser type and somehow set a different theme for older browsers? I've found that the "Yahoo" them is compatible with old browsers.

Thanks for that reference. I'll try it out. I'm not savvy with CSS so I need some good tools. But to answer your question: no, I don't think it's Mac vs. Windows. I develop as much on Mac as I do on Windows. I use Mac OS 8.1, 8.6, 9.1, and 10.2 as well as Windows 2000 and Windows XP and lynx on Linux.(However, I won't claim to have very structured or exhaustive compatibility testing process, I just have a lot of variety of machines and OS's!) It's just that I happened to try out the site with an old version of Netscape, 4.7, which happened to be on a Mac. A little investigation lead me to believe that Netscape 4.x just didn't handle CSS very well, on either platform. I wonder if anyone has done a GL site that checks the browser verion and either a) selects an appropriate default them or b) has themes that "adjust" based on the browser capabilities?

My ClearBlue theme uses two stylesheets - a simpler one for Netscape 4.x and a more advanced one for all the other browsers. The trick is that you can beat Netscape 4 with its own shortcomings, so it won't see the more advanced stylesheet. Try the MacOS X FAQ for an example.

Useful link: How to hide CSS from buggy browsers

bye, Dirk

Thanks, Dirk. That's the kind of example I needed. I have seen some of those tricks before, but I was not sure where and how to integrate them into the structure of GL themes and styles. I'll use clear_blue as a starting point to see how to "fix" my theme.