Does anyone know how to change the background so that only the border is affected?

Sounds like you're saying you want the main content area background to stay white while the background for the HTML body tag changes. Let me know if that's not right.

I just tested the Oxygen theme on my test blog using the Custom Colors feature, and the content area background didn't change when I selected a new color palette.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-design/custom-colors/

Or were you trying to work with the CSS editor and not the Custom Colors feature?

Could you post a link to the blog you're working with so I can take a closer look?

Cheers

Simon

I'm using the Oxygen theme right now. Does anyone know how to change the background so that only the border is affected? Previous themes I've used do this automatically, but when I change the background on Oxygen, the background for the whole site changes as well, making the content hard to read. How do I change the background without affecting the background of the body?

Thanks,
Paul

.entry-header {
display: none;
}

I have tried various suggestions to diminish the amount of white space between my header body text but nothing has seemed to work. I have a custom menu set up so that I don't have any page titles. Could this be the problem?

My site is http://furniology.com.

I'd be interested in finding out why that isn't done any more, so if you have suggestions as to how I might raise that question, I'd be obliged.

I really think this is a theme-by-theme case, to be honest. I know that the themes we're developing in-house are all based on _s and it, as well as many, many themes today just use body_class to spit out classes on the body. I imagine that this issue rarely comes up for self-hosted blogs, and for managed hosting like WordPress.com, we want to keep our code as clean and as close to how Core is handling it (so not programming in extra classes on the body as much as possible).

Sorry I don't have a 100% perfect answer for you, but I'll mark this resolved; please feel free to open up another thread if you run into any more problems. Have a good one.

I remember that, in the past, some themes included the category class in the body tag as well. I'd be interested in finding out why that isn't done any more, so if you have suggestions as to how I might raise that question, I'd be obliged.

Thank you for looking into this.

Here is the site: http://mainedoeupdates.wordpress.com/
Here is a category archive: http://mainedoeupdates.wordpress.com/category/programs/social-studies-updates/
Here is an single post in that category: http://mainedoeupdates.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/cross-discipline-literacy-network-registration/

I would like to have a category specific widget appear on both the category archive and single post in that category.

This works on the category archive, since the class "category-social-studies-updates" appears with the body tag and can be inherited by the sidebar (aside).

However, on a single post, that category class appears in article rather than body, so it cannot be inherited by the sidebar widget. Therefore, I don't know if we can hide or display that widget based on category.

Hope that helps.

Perhaps that explains why I am finding the application of category classes to the article tag pretty standard.

I'm pretty sure this is a Core thing, not just a WordPress.com thing. For example, the output of a single post in Twenty Twelve will give classes directly from post_class(). It doesn't matter what theme you're using; classes for categories will be added to primary post wrappers if post_class() is used.

Cheers.

Perhaps that explains why I am finding the application of category classes to the article tag pretty standard.

However, perhaps others have had this particular need and know of a theme which doesn't follow that protocol.

Are there any ways to use a non-inherited class in a different part of the CSS? Alternatively, are there any themes that place the category CSS class in the body tag rather than the article tag? (I've been looking with no success thus far.)

3)what the heck are those side margins on a website called, if not the background...and if they are the background, what is the main page background called?

Background color is the right thing. I would call them the body background for the part that doesn't have any text on it (because that's the body tag in the HTML) and main content or main column background color for the background that has content.

2) Why was it working and then all of a sudden stopped?

I'm not sure! It's hard to say since I didn't see the problem happening live myself.

1) How do I get the 2 different colors

Looks like you were able to get this figured out because I can see different colors for the body background and content area background at http://artifactuallyyours.com/

body {
background:#FFD14A;
}

This worked and it was perfect! But tonight I went in and was playing with the custom fonts and link colors and the background got all screwed up. It's now doing what it did before I entered the code--it's either ALL YELLOW or ALL WHITE.
I have triple checked that all of my custom settings are correct (in the custom background section it's set to white) and I have restored this css code to a few weeks ago when I first changed it. (please note, this is the ONLY code i have entered)
Please help! 1) How do I get the 2 different colors 2) Why was it working and then all of a sudden stopped? and 3)what the heck are those side margins on a website called, if not the background...and if they are the background, what is the main page background called?

Thanks!

.page .hentry .main {
width: 800px;
}

The best example is probably here, where the first two lines of the body (after the poem's title) are split into four despite there being a lot of white space on the right. It only happens on two pages, but it's a formatting problem that I can foresee bothering the contributors in question.

Thank you, and apologies for stream of questions. Nearly there...

All that code seems to have worked perfectly. I just need to make a few edits to the page content itself.

Thank you so much, you've been a huge help. Hopefully I'll be able to manage on my own for a while now, without bugging you further.