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Someone Patched The Neo-Sapien Theme But Now There's Another Problem

  1. lonestarverve
    Member

    All the blogs with the Neo-Sapien Theme stopped having those two right-hand sidebars floating back and forth to the bottom of the page, so I downloaded the template and sure enough someone had added /* Pull up sidebar when it wraps for narrow browsers */ to the narrow column commands which corrected the problem.

    But now the red #c30000 background behind the banner has changed colors to gray #444444. I've gone in and tried to change every #444 to #c30000 but the background color will not change back.

    Does anyone have a solution to this new problem?

  2. lonestarverve
    Member

    PS: Here are the links to my blog http://queerverve.wordpress.com/ and another blog with the same theme: http://lacrosseinsidethegame.wordpress.com/ to compare.

  3. lonestarverve
    Member

    Correction: There's two problems. The blogs with the Neo-Sapien Theme stopped having those two right-hand sidebars floating back and forth to the bottom of the page in Firefox only. -- It seems to be permanently down at the bottom of the page in IE now.

  4. raincoaster
    Member

    I am using the Neo Sapien theme on one of my blogs and do not see the error you're reporting on it. Looks like the problems may be unique to your blogs.

  5. lonestarverve
    Member

    Check out these blogs with the same theme in both Firefox & IE:

    http://lacrosseinsidethegame.wordpress.com/

    http://webtrafficdaily.com/

    http://octoberonline.wordpress.com/

    http://gayzetteblog.com/

    http://therisinghsm.com/

  6. universalgeni
    Member

    Yep, we have a problem, Huston...

  7. thesacredpath
    Member

    WordPress.com is using the original version of the theme, and that is the way it is designed as was confirmed in an email with the designer. The later version of the theme does not have this behavior, but then WordPress isn't using the newer version.

    My suggestion is to contact support and see if they will either modify the theme or port the newer version to work at wordpress.com.

  8. lonestarverve
    Member

    Isadora the Moderator did contact support and then this appeared on the template: /* Pull up sidebar when it wraps for narrow browsers */ and thats when these other problems started.

  9. thesacredpath
    Member

    It's going to take more than one line because some browsers are obviously ignoring what they commented out. Safari and Firefox on Mac both ignore their "fix." I haven't checked FF and IE on winduhs.

  10. isadora
    Member

    lonestarverve, I apologize for my poor english: I actually meant *you* should follow thesacredpath's advice, but I omitted the words: "if I were you". I didn't contact anyone, maybe it was a coincidence or somebody from staff read your thread. As a matter of fact, I am not *the* moderator, but just one of several moderators, so please just call me Isadora.
    Do contact support, normal forum users (including moderators) cannot help you with backend issues.

  11. lonestarverve
    Member

    Or I may have just read your reply wrong. But I just tried and it says "Support is currently closed. Normal support hours are Monday - Friday 8AM - 4PM Pacific Time." -- Isn't it 8AM Pacific time now, its 10:11AM here in Central.

  12. thesacredpath
    Member

    You are right, but keep checking. Once in a while they keep it closed if they have some big project or something going on.

  13. lonestarverve
    Member

    Okay, I was finally able to email them. We'll see what happens...

  14. lonestarverve
    Member

    I just got an email from a "Happiness Engineer" at WordPress and I'm not happy. -- He basically told me that its limitation of IE and the theme.

    I emailed him back and ask: why this theme wasn't shown with the sidebars at the bottom of the page or with some kind of notation about its limitations in the WordPress' "Available Themes" section before someone select it and spends hours setting up their blog?

    I also told him that the author has an updated version with all these bugs fixed.

    So I'll wait and see for his response before I get too whiny.

  15. tellyworth
    Staff

    Just to clarify: the version of the Neo Sapien theme on WordPress.com has not changed since November 2007. I think the sidebar tweaks you are referring to were added almost a year ago, in April 2007. You can verify this yourself by viewing the svn logs for http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/neo-sapien-05/.

    We very rarely make visual changes to established themes so as not to alter the appearance of existing blogs.

  16. lonestarverve
    Member

    Then this theme is even stranger than I thought. For a week, the sidebars moved back and forth every couple for hours in both the IE and Foxfire browsers on the blogs that I listed above. Now the sidebars haven't moved in 3 days in Foxfire but they seem to be permanently at the bottom of all the pages in IE.

    Very strange! I've never seen anything like this in the 12 years that I've being working on the web.

  17. thesacredpath
    Member

    FWIW, it moves for me in FF (mac and windows), Safari (mac and windows), and in IE7. No change from what I saw when you first posted.

  18. tellyworth
    Staff

    I'm not sure about that theme in particular, but a few themes have issues with the sidebar moving when the content of the main column is too wide. The problem tends to be more pronounced in IE because of box model width bugs. That would be my first guess as to why they move unexpectedly: the content of the front page changes.

    The other thing that can cause similar problems (though it's more dramatic) is an unclosed p or div tag within post content. It's easy to get an unclosed tag if you're using --more-- links:

    http://faq.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/why-has-my-text-gone-all-bold-italic/

    That FAQ talks about bold/italic but the same mistake can cause layout problems too.

  19. thesacredpath
    Member

    Actually tellyworth, if you bring up his blog and the narrow your browser window to where it starts to cover the edge of the right sidebars, the sidebars slip to the bottom of the page. When you widen your browser window, they come back into place. According to the author, that is how the original version of the theme was designed, and it was changed in the first update.

  20. tellyworth
    Staff

    True enough. I was just speculating on possible reasons for an unexpected change.

  21. lonestarverve
    Member

    Yeah, we tried the closing all the p or div tags within post content as the very first fix. -- When the right-hand sidebar moves, it moves on all blogs whether there has been a post or not.

  22. lonestarverve
    Member

    Its been 24 hours and I haven't had a reply back from customer support on my other questions about the Neo-Sapien theme. So I've emailed the author and maybe he can come up with a solution.

    But I have to say that after spending a whole week trying to get a simple blog up, change the colors on it and go about my business blogging, that I'm getting very disenchanted with WordPress. -- And its a shame, I've heard such great things about them and really like their their format.

    But I'll give it one more day before I start looking for another blog host. -- Once again, thanks to everyone to responded to this thread with help. I really appreciate it.

  23. thesacredpath
    Member

    @ lonestarverve

    Since it is the way the theme author designed it, I sort of doubt that WordPress is going to modify it. They try to stick as closely as possible to what the author intended, unless it is a bug or something, and according to the author, the right sidebar behavior is what was intended.

    The theme isn't broken, it's working just as the author designed it.

    It could be that the author can tell you what to change in the CSS to make the right-hand sidebars stay put if it is in the CSS (I didn't see anything when I looked).

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