@Brandon – Since this is simply a WordPress plugin, I can’t imagine the burden would be on the end user to know how many style sheets they have loading and to make such drastic modifications for a single plugin to work. These plugins should work out of the box right?

@ Papa – So there is nothing on my end that I need to take care of right? I would assume that version 5.1 would work in IE as 4.5.1 did before I upgraded. Not sure what Brandon is expecting me to do.  The modification he proposed is far to extensive that an end-user like myself needs to do to accommodate the shortcomings with this plugin/browser compatibility issue.  Are there any temporary fixes at the moment?  IE is still the predominantly utilized browser by websurfers, so this is causing a lot of great pain for my forum users. 

BigFeat said
@Brandon – Since this is simply a WordPress plugin, I can’t imagine the burden would be on the end user to know how many style sheets they have loading and to make such drastic modifications for a single plugin to work. These plugins should work out of the box right?

Well that’s not actually true is it? If IE has a maximum number of stylesheets that can be loaded then it is very much up to the site owner to stay within those limitations. There is nothing much a plugin can do if the user decides to go over that limit.

Interestingly – at least 3, if not 4 of your stylesheets are ONLY being loaded in IE which are, no doubt, aimed at getting around other diffidences in this non-standard, awkward and annoying browser. SO that doesn’t really help matters either does it.

@ Papa – So there is nothing on my end that I need to take care of right? I would assume that version 5.1 would work in IE as 4.5.1 did before I upgraded. Not sure what Brandon is expecting me to do.  The modification he proposed is far to extensive that an end-user like myself needs to do to accommodate the shortcomings with this plugin/browser compatibility issue.  Are there any temporary fixes at the moment?  IE is still the predominantly utilized browser by websurfers, so this is causing a lot of great pain for my forum users. 

Just to put that straight – IE is NOT the predominantly utilised browser any more and has not been for quite a while. That is, of course, disregarding any version pre-V7 which is unsupported by both WP and SP.

OK – so if this IS the issue – and I actually only see about 20 stylesheets being loaded – although some of those might include other sheets as, indeed, SP does – then what can be done.

Well the first thing is that looking at your site at the moment there seems to be some CSS aggregation going on and I can’t even find the forum styles being loaded so does that mean you have resolved the issue this way?

IE most predominate browser? Not even close anymore. Here, and of course not necessarily represent I’ve of net as whole, it’s 15-20% which is not insignificant.

But this new shortcoming of IE – just plain stupidity again on their part to have arbitrary limit of 31- has just come to light in last week or so. So, no, there is no solution or work around in place today. It’s a big deal to have to put this significant change/work around in place just for IE. Hence my statement about trying to get something out there soon. We cannot address an issue until it’s known to be an issue. You are the first SP user that we know about to suffer this IE issue. We only discovers it a week or so ago because it is came up in our own testing. Hence us trying to solve it already.

I know that doesn’t help you but you will either need to reduce the number if css style sheets included or hang loose until until we can get a fix in place.

I am on the road so no computer access but I think Andy can give you a wp plugin that will concat all the css to alleviate this problem until we are able to solve.

According to my Google Analytics stats: This is the following breakdown of Browser usage to my website:

1. IE = 32.07%

2. Firefox = 24.83%

3.Chrome = 17.83 %

4. Safari = 14.24 %

The remaining percentage comes from mobile browser views.  Therefore, those hard numbers/stats are the ones that I need to be concerned with for my website.  So I hope you guys understand when I said this is a great pain for a sizeable portion of my visitors, I made that statement based on analytical facts.

I would love to understand what I can do on my end.  I don’t think I have a firm grasp on identifying how many css style sheets are loading on my browser, where they are loading from, or how to manipulate them from not loading. If there’s anything that I can do as a band-aid for IE that doesn’t require expert level wordpress developer knowledge, then I’m willing to try. Not sure who Andy is, but sure whatever may help right now.

Thanks in advance.

As I said, our site may not be representative and we are committed to IE support. On road and replying via email so hope they are coming through.

Andy, what is that wp plugin for css concatenation that we looked at? Might be worth biggest trying until we can resolve in next release.

I think the first task is to determine that this is actually the problem.

I would, say, deactivate the font-resize and birthday plugins that I believe you have active and then see if things load Ok in IE. If they do then you could try this CSS aggregation plugin (http://yacobi.info/) to see if that helps things…

Disabling the plugins made no change at all.

The link you provided is dead.-http://yacobi.info/

If that made no change then it most probably isn’t the cause. But try the plugin anyway just in case. It works on my test site by the way.

You can find it on the Wp plugin repository and it is called ‘CSS And Script File Aggregation’.

This plugin didn’t seem to come up in the Plugins search field from my WP Admin dashboard, and it appears this may be why:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/css-and-script-files-aggregation/

I will install it nonetheless and try it out, but I hope that it doesn’t cause more damage to my site then it will help with this issues.

It doesn’t damage anything. If it doesn’t help then just deactivate and remove it.

Ok, the CSS plugin is running and I see no changes with the forum on IE. Here is a screenshot of the plugin settings page.

Two things…. Did you clear browser cache? And check the page source to seebif number of css files reduced.

Sorry, will be back Friday and can take a closer look.

Aahh.. I just opened it up in another pc running IE, and that seemed to work..  This temporary fix seems to be working fine so provided I don’t discover anything new, I’m a happy camper and can wait for the optimization at code level from you guys when you get to it.

excellent. I believe this is Steve’s next target project!

will start it today or tomorrow…