Fooled around with the colors a little more, got rid of some of the purples and went with a scheme that is much closer to the original colors on the old pages, looks quite abit better I think, I can look at it for more than two minutes without my eyes starting to bleed

Okay, the problem turned out to be that I had left the “float” property set to “left” in my “.narrowcolumn” class. getting rid of that solved the problem. Turned the plugin back on and reset everything else to the way it was before and things are fine now.

Arggh, for some reason Internet Explorer isn’t showing the new theme the way I want, basically the sidebar disappears. There seems to be two problems I’m hitting, the actual disappearing sidebar has somthing to do with setting the “position” property to “absolute” and then trying to place the sidebar 10 px from the top and from the left.
The other problem is when I set the width for “.narrowcolumn” to “auto”, it extends past the right hand edge, obliterating the sidebar if I decide to place it there.

Interestingly after a little testing, it may be something with the Menu Add in I’m using. If I disable that, then the menu shows up okay (well, not quite, but that’s a different problem). Also noticed that if I reload the page in Explorer, the menu will sometimes show up on the reload.
I figured out the Add In problem when I tried moving the “get_sidebar()” code to be before I fetched all the posts. The menu showed up but the Add In wasn’t working, which clued me in that it might be the problem.

Addition testing though, still a problem, not the plugin after all. Seems to be really hit or miss on whether the menu will show up or not.
However, the Journalized theme uses something very similiar and it doesn’t crap out, and doing some testing with a very basic page like http://www.brentsbasement.com/test.php works okay. It has to be something in the way my main area for posting is set up.

However, even removing that plugin doesn’t completely solve the problem of setting “.narrowcolumn” to “auto”, even if I move the call to get_sidebar to be before the display of the posts, the sidebar still won’t get displayed when the column is too wide.

Lots of messing around with the styles and page contents. Have things looking close to what I want. WordPress Pages still look a little odd, but getting closer.

Got the boxes that I wanted for the section headers in the sidebar by added some additional properties to “#sidebar h2″ in the “style.css”
Next was to add in code to pull a portion of the recent comments into the sidebar and display them. Pulled in the code from the “column-a.php” file in the Journalized Theme and modified it to work in “sidebar.php”. This does require the use of Scott Reilly’s Customizable Comment Listing plugin, and the code in the “sidebar.php” checks to make sure that function is available.
Also tweaked the coloring to make the blue darker for the “a, h2 a:hover, h3 a:hover” properties.

Now for the scary part, messing with the actual posting entries to get them formatted the way I like, with the date first in a box by itself followed by all the postings for that particular date.

Modified the “header.php” file in the root directory, and adjusted the “mainframe” division in “global.css”. Ideally, I will just get rid of the chunk of logic in all the pages that checks to see if the header has been set or not before deciding whether to use “mainframe” or “mainframeWP” as the division id since after my tweak the two are identical.

Interestingly, the Menu Addin doesn’t work on the External Static pages, which isn’t that suprising since they are outside the WordPress structure, basically just links to existing pages that I’ve adjusted to grab the WordPress Header and Sidebar.

Made a few addtional tweaks to the sidebar, adjusting the background color in a few places and copying some of the properties from the “grey-skin.css” file in the Journalized Theme to get it to look closer to what I want.

Reimplemented the Menu Plugin from this site for the new Theme:
http://www.mealldubh.org/index.php/software/fold_page_menus/

Next up will be to edit the sidebar code to give me the titles of the different sections in little boxes by themselves with a different background color than the rest of the text in the side bar. Then, do the same thing for postings in the main area so the date has it’s own box.

Ended up setting a left margin for the “#page” division in “style.css” to solve the problem of it overwriting the sidebar for low resolutions, also changed the width property for “#page” to be “auto” instead of “760″.
Commented out a couple more lines in “header.php” to get the header to be the same width. Adjusted the “height” properties for “#header” and “#headerimg” to be the same height as my image (”106px”) instead of “200px”.

Also changed the “padding-top” property for “h1″ to be “0″

Moving the sidebar proved to be relatively easy. I simply went into the “layout.css” file for the Journalized theme and looked at the settings for the “cola” division, which is Column A, the left hand column for that theme, then copied those settings to the “sidebar” division in “style.css” in my new theme. Worked quite nicely. Still need to adjust and rearrange the headings in the sidebar to be what I want, and, of course, switching to the new theme means that alot of the strange things I did to get the headers and contents of my static pages to show up through WordPress are now not working, which is actually part of the reason for creating the new theme, to come up with better ways of handling those pages and making them more robust.

However, I do see that there is still an area left over on the right hand side of the screen where the side bar used to be that isn’t being used now. Probably a setting somewhere in “style.css” that still needs tweaking.

After a little fighting with the code, figured out that the settings in “header.php” that were set up to use images for background colors needed to be commented out for the color settings in “style.css” to take effect.

Now, need to tweak the settings for the information in the main columns so it won’t blend into the sidebar at lower resolutions. Looks like that should be able to be handled in the “narrowcolumn” and “widecolumn” divisions in “style.css”

Dove into the header.php file, initially changed one section to put in my logo as the background, but that still had the other text over top. Reversed that and went near the bottom of the header.php file in the headerimg division and changed the reference to pull in the image instead of putting in text. Handily also includes the link I wanted.

I’ll still need to fiddle with the settings for the styling in the “headerimg” to get it to look like what I want since it’s pulling in background colors from other jpg files.

However, before I mess with that, I want to figure out how to move the side bar from the right hand side of the page to the left hand side of the page, and extend it to the top of the page, having the header start beside it instead of on top of it. Off to do some poking around in files and a little reading on CSS styles