New contributed theme: SpreadFireFox

By kbahey on 22 Feb 2005 at 02:17 UTC

Those who have visited Spread Firefox will know that it has a very nice theme, designed by Chris Messina (a.k.a. FactoryJoe). Since SpreadFirefox (also nicknamed SFX) runs on CivicSpace, it is behind Drupal in releases, and hence is at 4.4 or so now. After some persuasion (i.e. bugging Chris), and offering to work on the theme and bring it up to 4.5, he agreed, and I have been hacking at it for some time. It now works with 4.5 and Drupal CVS (pre-4.6).

Features

A lot of effort has gone into refining this theme. Some features of this theme are:

Minimum width imposed, but accomodates wider width as needed.
Works well in IE, Safari and FireFox.
Requires the PHPTemplate theme engine.

Code

The results of the above port are now in CVS: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/themes/spreadfirefox/

The project home page is at: http://drupal.org/project/spreadfirefox

Status

This is work in progress, and not final by any means. Chris an myself decided to release it in accordance with the release early, release often open source philosophy.

Volunteers needed

What we need is for themers, graphics designers, and style sheet experts to work around the rough edges in it, and refine it more and more. We also need testers to play with it and find the bugs, and open issues.

I am not a theme design person. My work on this theme was just to update the tpl.php files to get them to work with 4.5 and CVS. I can continue to change the code if needed, but CSS is not my forte.

Attention: Drupal developers who are attending the upcoming DrupalCon in Belgium: please discuss this theme with Chris, who is attending, and lend him any hand you can.

Comments

Tarball

kbahey commented 22 February 2005 at 03:02

There is no tar ball (tar.gz) for this theme at the moment.

Please be patient while the overnight run takes place and creates a tarball for all of us. Check the project page tomorrow.

Those who know CVS can go ahead and grab it from the contrib repository.

--
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For the non-geeks...

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 23 February 2005 at 17:11

...without CVS knowledge, any chance of making the theme available as a zip file?

Download

tangent commented 23 February 2005 at 18:57

http://drupal.org/project/spreadfirefox

SpreadFireFox theme causes 'major' white space on certain pages.

enthusaroo commented 1 March 2005 at 10:24

It seems like some people (including myself) are having problems with the SpreadFireFox theme how it causes an unexplained 'white space'.

You can see what I mean, here: http://www.loveacrossborders.com/index.php

The second test node "ghk" on the front page gets cut off after

</p>
  </div>
      <br class="clear" />

I don't know why

is causing pages to cut in half. It happens on other pages too, especially many pages under administrator.

What can I change to fix it from causing the giant white space? I've looked through the CSS and template files over the last two days. But I haven't been able to get a solution that fixes it.

The 'major' white space occurs in both IE and Firefox :/.

whitespace issue serious

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 2 March 2005 at 14:18

I noticed the issue in the admin pages, but it is now starting to happen in the site pages as well and is a real showstopper.

See www.actfordharma.org/development/

Please note that I have done nothing except create a few custom blocks and position them to the right or left. This may sound unbelievable, but is the fact. Any guesses about what is wrong?

It makes no difference whether I use IE or FF.1.0

something to do with blocks?

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 2 March 2005 at 17:24

Well, I turned off all the custom blocks and everything is fine again. There is certainly something amiss here. I have posted some screenshots:

www.actfordharma.org/sfx_theme.htm

Giving up on SFX theme

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 3 March 2005 at 16:48

Much as I hate it, I have to choose some other theme for now. There is really something wrong in the way custom blocks affect the display:

See www.actfordharma.org/block_problem2.htm for a screenshot

It is missing the block title and I can't understand why there is so much space all round the text- there is just one line of it.

I changed the theme to Democratica and it displayed perfectly.

I deleted SFX from the theme folder, downloaded the file and installed and enabled again, but with the same results.

Have the patches not been incorporated into the downloadable file?

How About Blocks on the Other Side?

Carl Ditzler commented 3 March 2005 at 18:18

Behavior with blocks on left and right?

Makes no difference...

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 4 March 2005 at 02:03

...whether the block is positioned on the left or right. So far, all the problems have happened when blocks have been positioned to the right.

Out of curiosity, I moved the block to the left, but with the same (or worse?) result:

http://www.actfordharma.org/development/

Aacckk... oops!

chrismessina commented 4 March 2005 at 02:37

You found my custom code! That was supposed to be removed before releasing... Sorry about that.

What you want to get rid of is this stuff is apply this patch: http://drupal.org/node/18346

Really sorry if you wasted time trying to hunt down that problem. Totally my fault.

Chris

--
Drupal Grand Usability Poo-bah
User Experience Architect for CivicSpace Labs

Oh!

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 4 March 2005 at 02:42

Thanks so much, Chris. It is such a nice theme that I got disappointed I couldn't get it to work.

I was going to apply this

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 9 March 2005 at 15:16

I was going to apply this patch when I read there are still problems with it. Has the correct patch been committed to CVS?

Sorry for cross-posting, but

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 15 March 2005 at 15:03

Sorry for cross-posting, but I realised this thread is probably the better place.

Was the correct patch committed to CVS?

I would love to use this theme for my production site, but am unsure about the status.

it's funny

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 4 March 2005 at 02:40

Just for the heck of it, I enabled cache in administer>settings and then created a custom block and positioned to the right. It showed up fine.

I then disabled cache and created one more block and also positioned to the right. Both blocks are displaying correctly, as you can see:

www.actfordharma.org/development

Wonder why block behaviour is inconsistent.

I encountered another problem when I created a custom block. The 'edit block' link never appeared and I have no way to delete the block now or add any content. I need to create the block again.

Will post a screenshot later.

Here is the screenshot...

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 7 March 2005 at 15:09

of a custom block that I created but am unable to use because the 'edit block' link never got created:

www.actfordharma.org/block_problem3.htm

Hmmm, enabling the block?

chrismessina commented 7 March 2005 at 23:55

The big difference looks like the block isn't enabled.

Does enabling the block allow you to edit it? This might be a new bug...

Chris

--
Drupal Grand Usability Poo-bah
User Experience Architect for CivicSpace Labs

Sorry, I forgot to mention

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 8 March 2005 at 07:44

Sorry, I forgot to mention that. I tried enabling the block before taking the screenshot, but 'edit block' link still didn't show up.

What's funny, though, is that the block displays- here is the screenshot:
www.actfordharma.org/block_problem4.htm

Ramdak

Hmm... DB issue?

chrismessina commented 8 March 2005 at 23:43

I don't know how the block system determines whether a block is "custom" or not, but if it's a bit setting (like "yes|no") then maybe this value got changed somehow? I mean, I don't know how that would be possible or if it's even likely... does this happen in other themes or is it just the SFX theme?

Chris

--
Drupal Grand Usability Poo-bah
User Experience Architect for CivicSpace Labs

This is the first time I

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 9 March 2005 at 02:36

It is possible that this is a database issue, but I reported this because it is the first time this has happened and I have tried all the themes except Friends Electric at one time or the other with custom blocks.

Thanks for taking the time to give attention to this.

Ramdak

Issues

tangent commented 22 February 2005 at 08:13

I have my test install in a subdirectory and the theme isn't working in that environment. You might want to replace the existing styles in page.tpl.php with

 <?php print $head ?>
 <?php print $styles ?>

There is also some loss of round corners on many blocks (header and sidebar blocks. It's a great start though. Keep up the good work.

The base URL is not correct.

carlmcdade commented 22 February 2005 at 08:29

The base URL is not correct. There is a backslash missing in page.tpl.php

<base href="<?php print $base_url; ?>" />
 should be :

<base href="<?php print $base_url; ?>/" />

that will get the theme to load.

I am working on fixing the paths now in the CSS. They are very in consistent.
---------------------------
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www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
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Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

I have to give big time

carlmcdade commented 22 February 2005 at 08:50

I have to give big time kudos for the handling of the administration areas. Incredible work and it actually increases usability where other themes remove it.
---------------------------
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__________________________
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Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

Sarcasm?

chrismessina commented 24 February 2005 at 15:10

Tell me Carl, are you being sarcastic?

The admin blocks aren't floated because it breaks in IE when you clear .admin-standard. If you can find a workaround for this, I'd love to see it.

Chris

--
User Experience Architect for CivicSpace Labs

Nope, I am being truthful.

carlmcdade commented 24 February 2005 at 15:22

Nope, I am being truthful. While the other themes tend to forget about the adminstration area the speadfire fox theme goes into the minutest detail. It is a pleasure to work with. The colors, font size and forms area adjusted so that they enhance usability.

This is totally unlike some of the others where textareas and tables are neglected and the use of color to increase readability and flow is not used at all.

Clean and snappy. Give yourself a pat on the back from me :)
---------------------------
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www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
Carl McDade
Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

I agree

kbahey commented 24 February 2005 at 16:13

Here is a second pat on the back for Chris.

One of the things that got me attracted to this theme is the level of detail for every aspect in it. The submit buttons, the help area, ...etc.

A lot of hard work went into it.

Congrats Chris.
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I've gotten all but one

carlmcdade commented 22 February 2005 at 11:05

I've gotten all but one rounded corner to appear and am still missing some colored borders. It's a nice theme but i have to critisize the way the sidebar rounded corners are done. They are not liquid.
---------------------------
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www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
Carl McDade
Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

Issues and patches

kbahey commented 22 February 2005 at 14:36

Guys,

You are welcome to discuss everything about this theme in this thread. Please continue to do so.

However, please start entering issues for things you see broken, or things that are fixed.

More importantly, attach files to the issues, and set the status to 'patch' if you have code, graphics, or css changes.

Do this from the project page http://drupal.org/project/spreadfirefox

This way these issues can be tracked and fixed and make it into the codebase.

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CivicSpace clarification

Greg Delisle commented 22 February 2005 at 14:38

I think I should point out something -- your sentence about the versioning is a bit unclear.

Since SpreadFirefox (also nicknamed SFX) runs on CivicSpace, it is behind Drupal in releases, and hence is at 4.4 or so now.

CivicSpace isn't behind Drupal -- they've just released their version 0.8.0.3 which is based on Drupal's 4.5.2, not on 4.4. It might be that SFX isn't running the latest version of CivicSpace and so the SFX theme was behind Drupal in releases, but that's not the fault of CivicSpace.

Anyhow, this is a terrific theme and thanks much to kbahey and Chris M. for working this up and releasing it.

Thanks for the clarification

kbahey commented 22 February 2005 at 15:17

Thanks for the clarification, and apologies for the inaccurate wording.

Yes, SpreadFireFox is behind a bit, and that is why I had to port it to 4.5 and CVS pre-4.6.

--
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Great theme

efeefe commented 22 February 2005 at 15:01

This theme is great. Thank you.

I'm having only one problem (already posted on bugtracker).

Are Css mistakes bugs or ...

carlmcdade commented 22 February 2005 at 15:09

Are Css mistakes bugs or ... ? issues. I am so used to just do whatever with CSS it is hard for me to make note if it was a bug or a adjustment because of the browser or design.

So far I have gone through all of the url ()'s to make sure that they have proper paths and quotes. Some had a single quote or bad path.

Then the sidebar -right blocks I adjusted to match the 247px top and bottom gifs for the blocks

Then I adjusted the rightcolumn width so that it was not pushed off screen.

The one rounded corner I can't get is the top left header above the fox.

Speaking of Foxes. the logo did not appear until after i wen through all of the url()'s so I guess that was a bad path also.

I n the administration areas the top and left borders for the gray/blue sections is missing.

The mission statement looks like it is missing some corneers but it is such a light color on my screen that I cna't really be sure.

---------------------------
www.hivemindz.com (running PHP5)
www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
Carl McDade
Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

Memory error.

canen commented 22 February 2005 at 18:33

Get this error when trying to use the theme.

"Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 67584 bytes)" the error is at "drupal/themes/spreadfirefox/page.tpl.php on line 126".
I am running drupal-cvs.

Any ideas?

That's a standard PHp memory

carlmcdade commented 22 February 2005 at 19:12

That's a standard PHp memory error. You can try and fix this with .htaccess

php_value memory_limit "16M"

But check with your host first to see if this can be/ must be changed from their side.
---------------------------
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www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
Carl McDade
Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

type: CSS-intentional-bug

tag-1 commented 22 February 2005 at 21:07

Heh, there almost does need to be an "intentional bug" type to handle the reality of CSS and browser support these days. Better than the pre-CSS days though...

Several issues have been addressed

kbahey commented 23 February 2005 at 03:53

Many of the issues that has been raised, with patches, have been applied.

Our good friend Tom Dobes takes the cake for opening the most issues, and submitting the most patches. All his patches are now accepted.

Great work Tom!

Let us see more work like this, with patches on everything else we discussed here.

Themers and Graphics designers, and stylers: your contributions are appreciated.

--

Consulting: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

--
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Personal blog: Ba

Where do you want things

carlmcdade commented 23 February 2005 at 17:09

Where do you want things like CSS documents and images. I feel wierd sending in the CSS and the image where the fox is removed from the header as patches.

---------------------------
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www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
Carl McDade
Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

TDobes submitted patches

kbahey commented 23 February 2005 at 18:41

TDobes submitted patches to CSS without a problem.

Make sure you sync with CVS HEAD first before you create patches.

For images, attach them to the issue, and I will replace the file with the same name with the one you send.

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It's confusing when i don't

carlmcdade commented 23 February 2005 at 22:21

It's confusing when i don't have a cvs account. I don't know if what change syncs in with what I have downloaded. Or if there have been issues with changes made after I downloaded the most recent. I wait until tomorrow and if no one has gotten this far http://www.fireorb.org/images/sffscrdump.gif

Then I'll create some patches.
---------------------------
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www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
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Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

CVS

tangent commented 23 February 2005 at 23:58

A cvs account is not required to create a patch. Download the source with the anonymous account, edit the file, and create a diff. Upload the diff file to the appropriate issue.

Read the Drupal patch guide if you need more information.

The problem is that while I

carlmcdade commented 24 February 2005 at 06:39

The problem is that while I was working there were two ohter patches submitted. How do I know if they are for the same things or for different?
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__________________________
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Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

Patch tips

tangent commented 24 February 2005 at 07:23

Just before creating your patch, update the file in question to be sure you're creating a diff against the latest version. If you updated the code a while ago, when you update the changes will either be merged into your local version or a conflict will be generated which you will have to manually resolve.

Obviously, it is more efficient if you create a patch and submit it as soon as you modify the code so you don't have to deal with conflicts as often.

Looks great so far

travischristopher commented 24 February 2005 at 19:22

I really like seeing the community come together together to work on a theme, I think this the most visible example of that i've seen so far, a real eyeopener as to the collabrative power of Drupal. It gets better every day!

Things are looking really good in Firefox, but I.E. still needs quite a bit of work, I was wondering what do people think about using the I.E.7 script as work around for I.E.'s issues? I know how some people feel about adding additonal javascript, and personally i'm still up in the air about its effectivness, although i have to admit i've only given it a quick once over.

Usability problems in Opera 8 beta 1

dors commented 24 February 2005 at 19:30

I have quite a usability problem with this theme in Opera 8 beta 1: I cannot select any checkbox or radiobutton once I've activated it. In essence, administering is currently not possible with it.

Anyone knows what's going on here, what could be causing it?

BTW: Should I open a bug report when finding something like this, or is it better to add a comment first?

Re: Usability problems in Opera 8 beta 1

mediamotor commented 24 February 2005 at 19:50

This is most likely an Opera issue, considering the nature of the problem and the version of Opera you're using.

I'd say your best bet is to wait until they have a more mature release, and if you must open a bug report, open it with Opera.

Opera has always given me

carlmcdade commented 24 February 2005 at 21:27

Opera has always given me too many problems so I have written it off to "specialty" along with other browsers that have less than 5% of the market.

But I'll check as see if one of their CSS guys will do a drop in.
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www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
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Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

Fixed in Beta 2

dors commented 25 February 2005 at 12:03

You were right: it is working now in Opera 8 beta 2. :-)

I have two sites up-and-running with the spreadfirefox theme

paddy_deburca commented 26 February 2005 at 18:03

I have two sites, http://deburca.org and http://amadain.net working.

All rounded boxes work (not in IE-tho).

I have also fixed a lot of the problems in CSS where blocks were floating too low down the screen.

Work continues....

Paddy

Paddy.

http://deburca.org

Amadain looks nice

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 27 February 2005 at 06:08

I notice that you have changed the background colour for the site slogan and also for the blocks.

How do I go about doing this?

In my case, I also added a custom block and set it to show on the right. The default background colour is a somewhat dark lime-green that I want to change? Any idea where and how to do this for a custom block?

Thanks

I use Fireworks to create the blocks and header

paddy_deburca commented 27 February 2005 at 09:51

I used Fireworks, I am sure that other graphic packages will do exactly the same thing.

I created a box - the width of my column.

To this box I added drop-shadow to get the nice shadow feature.

I also added round corners.

I then split the box into three; the top, middle and bottom and used CSS to position each item.

The header is a different beast.

There are two elements; the left and right. The left is approx 1600 px long but is only displayed up to 20-odd pixels from the right. The right part is then displayed giving rounded corners all the time.

The name of the site was origianlly a PNG - but windows does not display PNGs correctly. I then made the site name a part of the header image - so that I get consistency across all browsers.

Paddy

Paddy.

http://deburca.org

Thanks, that was a really

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 1 March 2005 at 08:07

Thanks, that was a really detailed step-by-step.

Problems with site slogan, primary links and secondary links

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 27 February 2005 at 06:23

A couple of issues:

1.) Site slogan display box is checked both in global settings and the spreadfirefox configuration page, but does not show up at all. Mission statement displays without any hitch, though.

2.) I also noticed that if both primary and secondary links are turned on, the primary links seems to override the secondary links- that is, the latter do not show up on the site at all.

You can see it on the following page: www.actfordharma.org/development where I have put in two secondary links and enabled them on both the SFX theme configuration page and the global settings for themes.

Would appreciate Chris' help on this.

Have you downloaded the

carlmcdade commented 27 February 2005 at 09:42

Have you downloaded the latest CVS? The primary , secondary link problem should have been taken care of.

---------------------------
www.hivemindz.com (running PHP5)
www.fireorb.org (documentation and hacks)
__________________________
Carl McDade
Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia

Not sure if it is the latest

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 27 February 2005 at 12:52

Not sure if it is the latest CVS, but I only downloaded and installed 36 hours ago.

3hours

bertboerland commented 27 February 2005 at 16:34

just did an install 3 hours ago, either the tarball was not repacked or the bug not resolved, because problem is still there.
--
groets
bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

Responses

kbahey commented 27 February 2005 at 16:38

For 1, the slogan is currently displayed, but is enclosed in
<div class="hide"></div>

I think the reason for this is that there is no room for it. I will leave it to FactoryJoe to comment on this. Perhaps you should open an issue for this.

For 2, I intentionally made primary override secondary if both are defined, since the theme is not designed to handle both. There is no much room in the header to put them.

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No secondary links, hidden items

chrismessina commented 28 February 2005 at 20:35

To answer the questions re: Secondary links and Slogans...

The SFX theme was designed specifically for Spread Firefox -- and when Khalid got me to open it up, I hadn't done any work to generalize it (which is why I opened it up -- to get some help!).

So, to begin with, I never put secondary links into the theme since we don't use theme on SFX. I don't know where they would go and they would be inconsistent with mozilla.org anyway. If someone's got a good idea or solution for this, make a mock up and I'll consider whether it makes sense to add it. Not all themes should necessarily work with two levels of primary navigation.

Second, there was no good place to visually show the slogan, so I decided to include it for search engines and folks who use assistive technologies like screen readers. It's also included in the homepage title tag, I believe.

Again, many design decisions came out of Spread Firefox's needs and no one else's. If you don't see something you need, mock it up and then we can consider whether it makes sense for a wider audience.

Chris

--
User Experience Architect for CivicSpace Labs

You are right that the

ramdak5000@www.drupal.org commented 1 March 2005 at 08:03

You are right that the slogan shows up in the homepage title tag. I think a practical way to deal with this may be to turn off the default logo and design a custom logo which also has the site slogan in it.

As for secondary links, it would be useful to turn off/hide the check box for this in the global settings page and theme configuration page.

Finally, a note about both these issues (until someone comes up with a solution) in the release notes would save people a lot of confusion and be much appreciated.

Input field jumping off screen to the right

Drupy-1 commented 1 March 2005 at 10:35

Thank you for a great theme! I love it and want to use it as the default theme of my homepage. I like it so much I was impatient to wait until its release with Drupal 4.6 :)

I am using Drupal 4.5.2 and IE6, I downloaded the latest CVS and individual file updates (I didn't do any patch, not sure if I can do it right). At first I get all these blank spaces when the center column dropped below the end of the third column, but after deleting all clear:both from drupal.css and changing some table width from 100% to 99% or lower, everything (user list, poll, profile, aggregator, tracker, comments after nodes) look to be in place except three things:

1. The input fields of node editing and comments will jump to the right and go off screen for at least 1 cm. (Those input fields look OK, but as soon as I tried to type something in it, they will jump to the right and go offscreen)
2. If I click the xxx reads of each node to see the view log, the middle column is dropping below the third column, and I don't know how to fix this.
3. Popular content page has the middle column starting alright but it will create a strange moving light blue space and the content drops below the third column like #2 above.

I don't really mind with the 2nd and 3rd problems, but the first problem is really inconvenient because all the words are lost off screen on the right and I can't see what I was typing when it comes to the right end. I'm wondering if these are easy things to fix, so could somebody kindly tell me how to fix these problems, especially #1? Thank you very much in advance.

fix for spreadfirefox avatar issue

sciman commented 8 March 2005 at 03:35

Love this theme, and wanted to use it in my university teaching, where the avatars are an important feature for me. The huge long space described in this thread was being produced at the bottom of every forum post, such that none of my students would have been able to figure out how to comment.

I wrote to KB since I've little to add to the dialog in this thread, and because I barely understand it. He suggested in response that I was observing a problem related to the "clear" issue, and he copied Chris on his response. Chris wrote and suggested that my problem probably related to the avatars being turned on. He suggested that I delete three lines from node.tpl.php .. I'll quote the lines to be deleted, though I'll substitute ( and ) for angle brackets

(?php if ($picture:: ?)
(br class;"clear" /)
(?php endif; ?)

I stripped out the code and all seems to be perfect! Thought I'd share in case there's somebody as weak on this stuff as I am looking for a similar solution. Thanks, Chriss & KB, so very much.. for the theme, the patience, the help.

POSTNOTE: 4/5/05 - Please see notes below. Not all of the clear issues seem to have been resolved. It's important in my application to use avatars, and this may have an impact on the issue. Input boxes to forum posts and other critical interactions remained a problem, even with the extraction of clears in the key css file noted below.

Steve

Q and A

kbahey commented 28 March 2005 at 02:37

In another thread, a Drupaller asked:

Was the SFX theme with the patches ever committed to CVS for 4.5?

The answer is: most of the patches received were committed. The details can be found here: http://drupal.org/project/issues/spreadfirefox

The issue of white space gaps in some pages (a.k.a. the 'clear' issue) has a workaround: either remove the 'clear's in the misc/drupal.css or move that file to some other name altogether.
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How-To-Box.com

kbahey commented 5 April 2005 at 23:39

Here is a site that uses the SpreadFireFox theme, on 4.6RC.

http://how-to-box.com

Lunas, I am curious: There is one known issue with this theme, which is the white space issue. In some cases, a 'clear' in css would cause wide gaps of empty space on pages.

Have you encountered this? If so, did you use the misc/drupal.css workaround? Did it help?

Can you comment?
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The Clear Issue

lunas commented 6 April 2005 at 00:03

Yes, I used the misc/drupal.css workaround, however it didn't fix all the problems. The white space issue was still showing up on the personal blog pages of my users and somewhere else I do not recall at the moment. To fix, I had to delete the <br class="clear" /> from node.tpl.php and then everything worked fine.

By the way, thanks a lot for the theme, I think it looks great on my site, but of course I'm biased. Cheers.

Lunas
http://www.how-to-box.com

Only change?

kbahey commented 6 April 2005 at 01:38

Just to clarify:

So you did:

1. misc/drupal.css change. Did you remove the file altogether, or just the lines that had a 'clear' on them?

2. Apart from the above, you deleted the <br class="clear" /> from node.tpl.php

3. Do you have any side effects?

I am asking so I can make these changes back in the theme, so others would not encounter the same problem.
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Changes

lunas commented 6 April 2005 at 13:24

Yes, that is all I did. As for side effects, the only one I've come across so far deals with when the admin tries to add content. The title and path field end up displaying across the boxes for node moderation and authoring information. If you know how to fix that, it would be awesome, but it is usable (for me anyways). Users don't have the problem because they don't have access to the node moderation block or the author information etc... otherwise they would see it screwed up as well.

white space work around

green monkey commented 25 April 2005 at 08:53

I finally got around to doing the white space workaround - replacing drupal.css wiht a blank page. Everything looks much better.

I saw this just a few minutes ago, look like a pargagraph break got dropped or something.

Source: Lable
Categories: ABCs (newsfeed)
01:48 start of next feed
The Next News ends up here

- it should of did a para break or two before 01:48

.... and as for Secondary menu, I would use it if was there. Where, how? Well to make it simple, perhaps you could do it up like the one here on drupla.org - drop it in below the tabs. which probably also means dropping your left Nav block about 1/4 of an inch. then I'm thinking that the secondary could go in the top right corner (as a text and not tabs) with the same right to left flow align

I made a few changes today.
- swapped SFX forum formatting, with one I worked up for Marvin 2k, a little more splashy

- changed "read more" to red

- swapped logo out - was having a transparentcy issue wiht new logo and IE, but not Firefox, so I saved it as a transparent gif and renamed to png after the upload. I don't know why that silly trick works, but it saves a little time trying to figure where the call to logo.pgn is

Chris & KB - thank you, its a very nice theme and pleasure to work with

I'll add a little comment

Adagio commented 25 April 2005 at 09:40

I'll add a little comment about the project page here. The university blogs have swithced theme, so one out of two example sites isn't a very good example :)

Slogan

green monkey commented 26 April 2005 at 07:45

just a quick note to all.

be sure to enter something useful in the Slogan Box, google likes that box

Everything works fine except not appearing site slogan

cyriver commented 30 April 2005 at 02:11

I use drupal 4.6.0 with newest spreadfirefox on firefox in linux platform.
Everything seems to work just fine: no white space problem, no box problem.
I checked with opera: also fine, not yet checked with IE.
Only one problem I encoutered was that no site name and slogan was appearing.

For site name, I found workaroud:
-delete logo.png
-create empty file naming logo.png
-since logo.png is empty, alt tag appears
-you can see my site at Make Money Blogging.

But site slogan still doesn't appear, though I don't actually want to be appered.

Personal blog:Linux Home

Hello,

green monkey commented 30 April 2005 at 02:47

Hello,

the comment above "slogan" pretty much says it:

http://drupal.org/node/17717#comment-30114

I only mentioned it in my comment above, becuase though you can't see -- doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. Google picked my up as part of the header link

No room

kbahey commented 30 April 2005 at 03:02

The reason is, this theme was developed for a specific site. There is no room in the header for much apart from what is already there.

You can add it yourself in the phptemplate. It is not hard to do if you basic PHP and HTML. Look at other phptemplate based themes, and copy/paste the code.
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thanks

green monkey commented 30 April 2005 at 05:16

thanks, I'll try that .. but for now I still have to get what I have installed ... working, before I have the time to go there and break everything that's already working ;-)

actaully CSS is keeping my brain .. pretty busy right now

I fixed it by replacing the logo with my own

Matt Simpson commented 30 April 2005 at 14:21

If you replace the default logo with your own, then you can control the content of the graphic. By using a screen capture of the title bar as your background, you can easily get the logo you create to mesh with the title bar. Obviously, impose some font on top to print your site's name. I did the whole thing using SnagIt (capture, edit, save as png file).

don't forget

green monkey commented 30 April 2005 at 15:31

I just replaced mine as well, don't forget there is "transparent" background too. I try to use it often, just in case someday I want to change the backround to a differnet color, there will be one less thing I have to work with.

Will goodbasic's Drupal theme fix help?

venkat-rk commented 30 April 2005 at 04:36

I asked Jarrod Piccioni of goodbasic.com if the fix he has proposed for drupal themes will help spreadfirefox also:

http://www.goodbasic.com/blogging-tools/drupal-theme-fix

Haven't tried it out yet though.

Event module

green monkey commented 30 April 2005 at 05:20

Can anyone offer any advice on how to fix the overflow issue with the event.module calendar?

the visual month calendar, when in a "right" block

should I fudge the calendar, right column or center column widths - not sure the pros and cons of each adjustment

not sure about goodbasic's fix

syaman commented 30 April 2005 at 09:10

I've just read Goodbasic's post but I'm not sure what is meant by

Wrap the content call print($content) in it's own DIV, I called mine "stuff"

Anyone has any examples on how I'm supposed to do this? And is the additional code supposed to go into style.css?

print($content) wrapper

jpiccioni commented 30 April 2005 at 12:33

Hi syaman,

Sorry if that was confusing, what you would want to do is open up the "page.tpl.php" file and look for the following:

<!-- start main content -->
<?php print($content) ?>
<!-- end main content -->

and then change it to:

<!-- start main content -->
<div class="stuff"><?php print($content) ?></stuff>
<!-- end main content -->

I haven't tried my suggested fix with the Spreadfirefox theme, however if it works (or doesn't), let me know.

Jarrod, GoodBasic

don't laugh

green monkey commented 30 April 2005 at 15:43

don't laugh .. becuase I just don't know

what word should I use to replace "stuff" .. kb ... joe?

I have the them open right now, trying to fudge it right for the Event module, can I test this change in a flash

well...

green monkey commented 30 April 2005 at 16:17

well .. I can confirm ... don't use the word "clearing" for "stuff"

but I am happy to say if you're using the event.module and have the calendar in the right sidebar block .. this will fix the overflow .. looks a little skinny .. but it works

in the module.css

.sidebar .event-calendar td.days, calendar td.day-normal, .sidebar .calendar .header-week {
color: #798786;
font-weight: normal;
background: #fff;
text-align: center;
padding: 4px 2px;
}

change to......................

.sidebar .event-calendar td.days, calendar td.day-normal, .sidebar .calendar .header-week {
color: #798786;
font-weight: normal;
background: #fff;
text-align: center;
padding: 1px 0px;
}

seems to be working!

syaman commented 30 April 2005 at 16:19

Thanks for the clarification, jarrod!
I did the edits on the SpreadFireFox theme per your instructions and the dreaded "white space" issue seems to have resolved!

I uncommented the entire section under /* For administrative pages, keeps the tables from growing too wide */ though, as my admin pages don't have a display problem at present, and the code would also have made the summary page of the bookreview module a little too small.

Once again, thank you!! :)

did you have to make any other changes

green monkey commented 30 April 2005 at 16:43

syaman,
did you have to make any other changes .. besides the little one above.

I made one that change and left "stuff" saying "stuff"

but ... aggregator looks the same (about 3 inches of white)

thanks

didn't have to

syaman commented 2 May 2005 at 09:38

Nope, otherwise I followed the modifications on the blog post to the letter :)

Please submit patches

kbahey commented 30 April 2005 at 17:15

There seems to be at least two or three solutions to the white space problem.

Can those who fixed it submit issues against the SpreadFireFox theme and attach the changes in the *.css files that made it work? It is best if you submit it in patch format against the latest versions in CVS.

As a last resort, you can attach the entire *css files that fixed the issues.
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Primary link menu (header)

green monkey commented 15 May 2005 at 06:06

I'm trybing to add a Flexinode Category to the top header menu in Spreadfirefox, but don't seem to be gettting the correct syntax.

if I go into Admin>categories I can it it as the vocab
a href="http://www.site.com/taxonomy/vocabulary/15" - with brackets of course

and I can see the first term as:
http://www.site.com/admin/taxonomy/edit/term/61

i've tried
/node/flexinode-1
and get the front page

I've tried
/vocabname - no page found

i've tired
vocbaname - page not found

i've tired
/flexinode - no page found

I've tired
flexinode - no page found

i've tried
flexnode-1 page not found

and I'm about to try
/please vocabname

can this be done? Can't I reference flexinode groups like modules

like
/fourm

============= Edit org post

I'm still trying with this and have just added another term

when I goto that new term page, i can see

http://www.mysite.com/vocabname/termname

yet if I put

http://www.mysite.com/vocabname

/vocabname

in the primary menu - it won't work. hmmmmmmmm

...well it took me long enough :-)

green monkey commented 17 May 2005 at 01:01

...well it took me long enough :-) .. but you can't do that with the current vocab/term structure... but maybe with Clipper

anyway on a differnt side of things. Joe well done !!! everyday I find something new about your theme that I like. today I loaded the amazon module and the right column loosk great !!

thanks again for sharing!!

SFX and 4.7.2 almost there

hedge-1 commented 28 June 2006 at 16:32

I have been hacking away on this theme for a while now and have it displaying in FX pretty well. If anyone out there would like to join me in getting this puppy to work for IE this theme could be ready for 4.7.2 in short order. I have it working with Block Regions and appears to be behaving well, as well as the white space issues solved with tables in the page.tpl.php (may not be the best solution but it works). If your interested in helping with the CSS for IE please contact me. check it out here http://www.sys-doc.com/47 . IE breaks the menu in a big way appearently can't use the 'hover' correctly in the nav menu.

hedge
sysdoc@sys-doc.com