Geeklog Forums

I have a slight problem with how various sections are called. The system currently in place works fine for a table based layout, but I'm having difficulty getting the right blocks to appear where I need them. The way I have my CSS divs setup, I call them in this order:
left blocks
right blocks
center content
footer

I don't seem to be able to call the right blocks in the header.thtml file. And since I can'd do that, my whole layout breaks. Do I need to edit the php files to get this working? Is there a workaround that others who have a CSS layout use?
And does this solution take into account the fact that almost all pages (except for the main page) do not include the right blocks?
Thanks for any help you can provide.

change the order of the css... the way GL creates pages (AFAIK) is header, left, center, right, footer. There are plenty CSS templates (try here: www.csscreator.com) that render in this same order. Also, by having your center block so far down, your page may not get the hits it deserves as a lot of crawlers only categorize the top part and/or would give the info on your page a lower rating.

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-- destr0yr
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

GL core is calling in the right blocks in COM_sitefooter, not in COM_siteheader.
I think that when you move the call from footer to header, your layout might work.

Cheers !

see here

Thanks for all the help.
I managed, thru the miracle of floats and negative margins, to get my layout rearranged into left-center-right. Only took me this morning. Of course, it took all the junk I've learned about the quirks of CSS in the past 3 months too. But lets not focus on that.

And it works in win/IE in case anyone was curious. So now I will be able to release this layout as a sort of barebones CSS/XHTML theme when I'm finished.

got a URL where we can see your progress?

I can't post a URL quite yet, as I'm still heavily editing it and you could get a completely broken site depending on when you look at it. So instead, here is a 210KB Screenshot of the site in progress.

It's a fixed width (because of the pictures at the top), the pictures at the top are randomly chosen from a folder of images, the search button will eventually be a click dropdown menu similar to the search function on version 3 vBulletin boards. The menu on the left expands on click, using javascript and css. The entire site is CSS/XHTML compliant. There isn't a table anywhere. It also uses 24-bit PNGs with alpha channels. It's been tested in win/IE, mac/safari and IE and mozilla. It looks nearly identical in all of them (the only difference being a slight text spacing issue, but the pngs work in win/IE with the sleight js hack).

The trickiest part about this whole thing was getting all that overlapping with the left and right blocks to work. I'm not using background images to get that effect. The white box with the black border is actually a div. So I can change it's color, border, width, etc.. if I ever change my mind.

So yeah, lemme know if you have any questions. I'll be working on trying to get the whole thing integrated properly (I did the whole thing in a static file and then chopped it into the proper .thtml files) into Geeklog over the next few weeks. And I'll post a URL to the finished product if anyone is interested.

you need to edit your link so we can see the pic. Are you saying that you got rid of all that tables beyond the index page? like, eg, all the admin tables and tables for stats and profiles, and all of the form tables, etc.? and I wonder how you dealt with plugins invading your space...let me know.

remember that tables do have a use even in a site that is laid out with CSS, ie, to present tabular data, like stats or even a profile.

Fixed the link. Guess it didn't like me the first time around.

As for the tables, I haven't gotten to the pages beyond the index page quite yet. I meant to say that I had gotten rid of tables purely for layout purposes. I'll definitely still use them for tabular data.

And, to clarify something else, the site isn't entirely XHTML valid because a lot of the random code (like br and img, etc..) are called from the lib-common.php file. They require small alterations in order to validate. Not a huge concern, but thought I should mention it.