jumbled?? what does that mean?  screenshot?  actually, I can see it fine…

back when this started, remember I told you to make sure you column %s did not exceed 100%?  well, they total 106% right now… so things wont fit… adjust your column widths to stay within 100%…

This is what the view of the forum looks like using Internet Explorer:

1. Pic 1 – First page of Forum, looks fine – http://prntscr.com/joad0

2. Pic 2 – View of “Introduce Yourself” Thread – http://prntscr.com/joahq

The issue seems to be an Internet Explorer issue.. Here is the exact same post from FireFox – http://prntscr.com/joapm

So this seems to be a browser based issue. I got the same results from two separate computers using IE.  Can you try to view using IE as well? The % tweaks I did seemed to work just fine for FireFox, but the format is way too screwed up in IE. In fact, the frames don’t even seem to appear.

did you apply the correction I said in the post above??? it appears to be a column width issue… you have total % widths greater than 100%… after changing, did you clear your browser cache too? IE insidiously hangs on to cached data…

Any suggestions as to which php files I need to modify and to which value without compromising any of the modifications I’ve made to improve it from what it started as?  As the changes I’ve made appear to work nicely on FireFox, I don’t want to screw anything up to ruin the work I did to at least get that done.  I’m trying to figure out which lines I need to modify to bring it down by 6% total.

Mr Papa said
did you apply the correction I said in the post above??? it appears to be a column width issue… you have total % widths greater than 100%… after changing, did you clear your browser cache too? IE insidiously hangs on to cached data…

keep going a bit lower… IE treats padding a bit different than some other browsers… so you may want the total at 98 or something… if I can, will stop by shortly and see – but getting late… with IE and the dev tools, easy to just ‘what if’…

I would appreciate any help in that are

I can’t look at this is IE (OSX user) but I can see the issue in Firefox. The real problem is that your theme allows so little width to display the forum page. But – some details.

The three main templates are spGroupView.php, spFiorumView.php and spTopicView.php.

Each of those – in the sections for displaying forum lists (spGroupView), topic lists (spForumView) and post lists (spTopicView) divide the display up into columns. These can clearly be seen in the templates by the use of the sp_columnStart() function.

Each column is given a default percentage width – looks for the width= value in each column. When taken together these should never add up to more than 100% although – as Steve pointed out above – because IE is still not totally CSS standard it is better to use a total of under 99%.

If I look at your ‘front’ forum page (spGroupView) and add up the percentages – I see they currently total 106%. Hence the mess.

I can’t advise so easily on good values to use – it is a bit of a try it and see – but certainly I can see you can reduce the icon left hand column for starters. You really need to fiddle with these values until it works for you remembering to keep within the maximum value.

This sort of tinkering is rarely needed by the way but is usually needed when the space allowed for the forum is so narrow.

As always we recommend that you create your own SP theme so that any customisation is not lost during a future update. (http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/themes/theme-basics/creating-a-theme/)

I’ll give it a try.. I am running my own child-theme for the forum at the moment.

It’s a lot easier than it sounds!

Ok.. All of my Percentages in (spGroupView), (spForumView) and (spTopicView) are all at 98% or less. This made no change once I clicked on the individual forums.  There still is no padding showing up in this view and all format is jumbled.  Any ideas now?  Again, this is all happening under IE.

The following screenpics shows a view of the exact same Forum thread from FF and the second from IE:

Oh that is a different issue entirely.

That is IE not loading the forum stylesheet at all. have you tried emptying the IE browser cache?

Yes, I cleared it out and in fact, I also just tried it on a copy of IE on a PC I have never opened the site on before and same results.

Again, this happens after I click on any forum link. On the surface, the stylesheet loads fine on the forum home page, but until I click on any Forum thread, the stylesheet dissapears.

It looks like you have to many CSS files being loaded. Internet Explorer imposes a maximum limit of 32 individual styleSheets so it can’t load the one needed for the forum topics.

You will need to remove any unneeded ones or combine some.

Please note that SP itself adds a bunch of style sheets to exacerbate this stupid IE limitation (could IE get any worse?).

We are currently working on a solution to concatenate all of our css files into a single or couple of css files to help alleviate another IE shortcoming.

Unless we hit a roadblock, out plan is to get this into a release soonest.