More phpWebsite theme changes and hacks v2

Well I finally went after the rest of the annoyances I have with my website layout for the farm. I had been thinking about modifying the color scheme so one thing led to another. The first thing I went after was cleaning up my positioning in the mast head. As a quick fix I had thrown in a blank line to fix the positioning of the divs. I meant to go back and take it out but I never got around to it. Positioning divs can get pretty funky. By using float:left and a large enough width on the top div I can get correct positioning. Now I have the horse jumping over the navigation bar in both IE and Firefox.

The tough part was fixing up my right content. I have a two column design with a fluid left content column. The problem appeared in several differnt ways but the best example was the dotted bottom border would wrap to the left content. I would get about 10px of border on my left content. I think I solved this problem with right padding on the right content. Now I had a positioning problem. My right content was right next to my left border. In some cases it would overlap my left content and it seemed oblivous to left margin or padding. After some playing around I found that increasing the right margin on my “left content” moved the text in my right content to the right and gave me a faux left margin on my right content. Oh well!

My final fixup was the linkman module. phpWebSite uses tables to display url link info. The default setup overlapped my right content when I viewed it using FireFox. Despite my efforts to convince FireFox that my table was only 600 pixels, it ignored me and calculated the table width. IE was a little better. It resized my divs to make everything fit. Not what I asked for but it was a better looking failure. I played with a lot of stuff but ended up reformatting the table to a smaller size by removing the url column. With the remaining columns FireFox and IE would calculate a smaller width for the table. I put the url field in its own row that spanned the columns and reduced the font size. So for every link I used three rows rather than two rows. The first row had the Title, Visits, and Date Posted. The second row had the url and the third row had the link description. Now the Links page was truly usable.