Theme not quite right ?

Client Joined: Dec 04, 2004 Posts: 757

Hi all, for the past few years I have had a problem with a theme where the tables that hold the center blocks on my front page are offline for some reason Question

The silver like box is made up of images and they appear to be offline Crying or Very sad

I was wondering if anyone here would have any idea at all what the problem maybe ? or where I could find which file I could at least start to look in?

many thanks for any help.
mrix
My problem is on the front page of my site within the center blocks and the forum here .... [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 3:24 pm

I am not seeing the problem using Mozilla 3.6.3. In fact, your site looks great to me.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 3:25 pm

Hi there one of the most popular browser being I.E has the issue Sad

So a vast amount of my members will see it look bad Sad

Cheers
mrix

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 4:08 pm

I looked at it in Safari 4.0.5, Google Chrome 5, Konqueror 4.4.2, Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10.53, Firefox 3.6.3 and it looked the same in all of them. I did not see any image issues.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 4:24 pm

Sorry, I had IE 8 in compatibility view so it was showing your site like IE 7 would. It appears to be a padding issue maybe. A quick and easy fix would be to open includes/mimetype.php and after the closing ?> tag add the following

Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php echo $mime ?>;charset=<?php echo $charset ?>" />


<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

That will make IE8 view your site in compatibility mode without visitors having to do anything.

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 11:40 pm

Hi there in that file the last line shows this....

Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php echo $mime ?>;charset=<?php echo $charset ?>" />

Do I just add what you have posted after?

cheers and a big thanks for the help.

mrix

Posted: Wed May 19, 2010 11:47 pm

Hello I have added what you suggested and for I.E it worked fine Smile

Is there any compatibility pieces of code for other browsers ? I personally use Google Chrome so the tables / images are not looking great.

also as its a compatibility problem I guess there was nothing really wrong with the code in the fact that it did not have something missing or changed from the original theme code ?

Thanks so much for this help at least its looking great again in I.E

mrix

Posted: Thu May 20, 2010 4:37 am

I'm sorry,

Code:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

should have been added after the last meta tag. That was more or less a band-aid to the problem. This should give you some time to figure out where the issue is.

If I were trouble shooting the issue, the first thing I would do is deactivate my center blocks one at a time to make sure none of them are causing the problem. If they are not the problem, I would start looking in my themes block code for issues.

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 4:56 pm

Okay... long time member... first time posting (in, ohhhhh so long)

Most of the issues you are referring to come from a lack of compliance to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard. I hate to sound like a broken record; however, anyone that knows me (and there are one or two out there) have heard me complain about Nuke Themes failing to adhere to W3C Standards and the problems that arise from that.

At this point in time, your homepage has the following compliance errors:

The main frame has 1300 Theme coding errors. Ouch!
The second frame (google ads) has 35 errors. (Why I never use google ads)
The third frame (google ads) has 45 errors and 5 warnings.
The forth frame (google ads) has 45 errors and 5 warnings.
The fifth frame (fishingtackle ad) has 85 errors.
The sixth frame (Ad this) is holy cow... compliant!

Bottom line? Your theme needs a ton of help. If you want things to look correct in a cross browser environment, W3C Compliance is critical to success, especially with junk like IE8 out there (insert expletive here).

If you want to see how things look for yourself (and to start fixing some of the biggies), start by going to the this page:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sea-fishing.org%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Finally, when you deal with Theme people, always ask this very important question. Is your theme 100% W3C Compliant to XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.1 Standards? If not, move along to one that is!

Just my two cents, please take my words with a grain of salt!
Steph

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 5:19 pm

Totally respect what you are saying but editing of the theme to get it 100% compliant or even close is way over my head unfortunately Sad

Also from what you say my themes would need a ton of work needed doing Crying or Very sad

Don`t suppose you know anyone that does this type of work?
Cheers and thanks
mrix

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 6:00 pm

I'll let the other "regulars" chime in about your theme and maybe helping. I rewrote my own CMS from the ground up to address these issues. It turned into such a hassle keeping up with Nuke, that I decided to go preemptive and fix everything one module at a time. In many cases, I was picking up on bugs that had been there for years and years. It took too many hours (to even describe) doing that work and I've since been extremely busy doing my "real" job and have others running my boards.

I would throw out there that many of these issues you CAN actually fix yourself with very little (or limited) coding knowledge. Rather, with the right tools that will lead you down the right path(s) to identify and fix the bugs, YOU CAN!

One such tool is a great little add-on for Firefox called HTML VALIDATOR. (Search for it!). This tool will ID the bug and even provide the correct "language" to fix it. Some bugs in your themes can all be fixed in groups (think global search and replace). Some have to be fixed one by one; however, you can really whittle them down because remember, these are templates. You'll fix things sections at a time and those fixes will (for the most part) be global.

If you feel overwhelmed, I suggest you begin by going back to the authors of your theme and asking for help from them. If they aren't willing to provide any, you can either start by working on it yourself or by trying to get some (sigh) paid help. Finally, you can look for a theme that is already compliant! (Be careful, MANY make the claim that they are compliant when if fact they are not!) As far as I know (and take this with a grain of salt because I've been away for a couple of years), I am the only Nuke coder to every write a 100% XHTML and CSS Compliant theme.

I wish I could be more help myself; however, I'm working 80+ hours a week out here in Iowa and just don't have the spare time to tackle another theme (besides having to load whatever you have for a CMS to test it against... as some problems may not be in the theme; but in the code of the CMS itself!)

Hopefully, this has been a little helpful!
Steph

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

Steve, is this ( 1CMS 3.2.1.15) really down-loadable? I'd love to see what you've done with the place Wink

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 8:41 pm

The themes that are distributed with Ravennuke are 100% compliant and have been for several years. I believe it was February 2007 when we did the brunt of the work on making the themes compliant and we've checked and cross checked every release since. This is not to say that you can't find a non-compliant page within one of these themes ... if someone edits a message or news article or content in a non-compliant way it can get through.

When we were doing the theme work I remember noticing that many of the themes had basically the same sets of errors (table rows and cells that were opened but not closed, etc.). I believe the original set of themes were all cloned from the same sources and thus inherited the same genetic defects.

The number of errors that the validator kicks off can be misleading because a single error can often cascade into dozens or even hundreds. But still, the first thing I'd do when looking at a possible them is to validate it (Firefox or the w3c validator) and if it had a bunch of errors I'd toss it right into the garbage can.

After posting the above, followed Steph's lead and looked at the theme on the fishing site mentioned in the first post in this thread. It's a mess. I would not use it -- if you do you are going to need to recode the whole thing. Basically, none of the syntax rules for compliant html are followed. Attributes are not quoted. Tags are uppercase or however the author felt like writing theme. Attributes that don't exist are used. Send the thing to Davey Jones' locker.

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 9:45 pm

Raven wrote:

Steve, is this ( 1CMS 3.2.1.15) really down-loadable? I'd love to see what you've done with the place Wink

After the fiasco where I allowed a few people access to the BETA version only to find these guys were simply stealing all of my code and gutting the credits, I closed the loop, took the main (public) site down and finished reworking all of the bugs.

At that point, I was re-approached by some of the folks on the Government side that wanted to have a stable, secure CMS for various projects. I put it up to replace my old SharePoint/Nuke/phpBB setup on GovTech.us and due to the popularity, began distributing it to other Government Agencies under the conditions that all Copyrights (that I painfully researched and restored after finding that FB had stripped them all out of Nuke) be left in place and that any patches or revisions be fed back to a special 1CMS mailbox. Finally, that I have permissions to access any domain running it.

Since that time, I have paid to have it security checked and reviewed for any vulnerabilities and patched the miscellaneous stuff that needed it.

My decision to not distribute the solution to the general public was based solely on 3 issues:
1) I spent almost an entire year recoding Nuke 7.6 including reviewing every single line of code to fix about everything (there were a few things in the news module that I wasn't happy with; but alas I've worked around them).
2) When I showed that code to a few people, they decided that it was so good, they decided to steal various parts of it, integrate it into their solutions and take credit for doing the work. Totally uncool!
3) I felt exhausted and betrayed and at the same time my primary 64bit.us domain was hijacked by a schmuck in Mass trying to sell it back to me. That alone still pisses me off. (Pardon my French).

Given those series of events, I thought it better to just go back to work and keep my code to myself. I've tried to point people in the right direction now and then (think of the htmlentities issue for example) and have provided "tidbits" of code; however, I haven't given anyone the entire package because frankly, I'm sick of working so hard only to have someone flat out take credit for my work. I never minded giving it away; but I did mind others taking credit for something they had nothing to do with.

I think we all know about these kinds of betrayals and they are quite honestly hard to move past. It is painful. I'm glad your team was so dedicated to make RN a quality solution. It's also nice when people like Technocrat share their experiences and like learning as much as sharing what they've learned. I'd passed quite a few tidbits onto him just before I bowed out of the public arena.

Recently, I found a few of the modules I've written out there on the Web with other people's name on them. I simply laugh and move on (I still die every time I think about how much time I'd spent on Platinum only to see my code, but no mention of my name).

I have also noticed there are still a few sites running my old Syndicated News module and blocks that have been kind enough to honor my Copyrights. In quite a few cases I have written to the webmasters explaining that they can strip my credits out of the display pages and just leave them in the source, mainly because I don't want anyone going to 64bit.us to give that jerk hits on his "This domain is for sale" page.

My main concern about protecting 1CMS at this point is the number of Government Agencies using it. Because of that, I have kept the source to myself. I'm thinking however that I want to write a completely new library based CMS solution (if I ever get another year off to dedicate to it!)... Smile

In the meantime, I'm more than happy to review the latest RN distro and see what I can see and help in any way that I can (in what little time that I have). In closing, I'd like to thank the hundreds of people that have contributed to all flavors of Nuke over the years and I'm not talking about FB. While you will not see the words Chatserv, Raven or even Bob Marion in Nuke (or others that are gone from the community now) they are not forgotten and they will always be mentioned (and be given full credit for their invaluable contributions) inside my code!

Posted: Mon May 24, 2010 10:20 pm

I understand. This is great, albeit sad because of the idiots that you mention - More history that was, until today, unknown to the GP and many friends of past years!

RN is being split, so to speak. I am basically going into a maintenance mode with version 2.x. Palbin is leading the development on v3.x, along with KGuske, Guardian2003, JakeC, FKelly, JEstrella, Susann, CodyG, Dad7732, FireATST, Dawg, FloppyDrivez, Nuken, SpasticDonkey and probably a few more that I have forgotten! The Team has really grown. These are the official members but there are many others that help to direct us and even supply code, modules, blocks, etc. You probably haven't met Palbin but he and the Team would welcome your comments as they start the groundwork for RavenNuke (tm) v3.x.

Btw, just so you know because he hides his online status all the time, SixOneTonOfFun has recently returned and is even posting now and then Wink

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 12:02 am

I kind of took us off-topic (slap me now.. just do it)... so any moderator, please feel free to cut these out and move them to wherever... (I can find them, trust me)...

On that note, if Six is back, maybe it's almost time to start working on CNBYA again eh? lol (I still have that unreleased code too!)...Gotta love archives!

I see Guardian and Kguske past me in posts (um... bigtime) God I'm getting old, or I guess I should say my posts are! lol

Like I said about the themes (hopefully nobody took that the wrong way), my work on them was years ago and I was apparently one of the only people back then that thought compliance to presentation standards was important. The first theme was the hardest and I've found most of my fixes embedded in every theme since go figure after thousands of downloads of my compliant MdesignPC theme, then working with my good friend Effectica in 2005 (who created all of the artwork for 1CMS) he crafted the "A4" theme and we working together to make it HTML 4.01 compliant and in late 2005 I coded it to be XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 Compliant. We were a tad ahead of our time; but a lot of good came out of it!

As far as my future contributions go (am I still in any of the hidden dev forums?)... pondering..... I wouldn't mind contributing if I have something that others might find valuable; but I'm not coming back to step on anyone's toes. Wouldn't mind testing (or fixing) though and always open to working on Docs. I've been thinking about some of the changes I made to my version of NukeSentinel and pondering redoing the manual, but I digress.

On that note, I already want to recode your center forums block to be like mine was! (Using the compliant scroller)... and yeah, I've still been playing with making ECMA (um.. Xscroller) a viable library.

Other than that, I've been getting pretty heavy into Ubuntu and getting everyone I know off of anything Microsoft. Alas, work is all MS, so I spend half my time editing Group Policies, Registries (yuck!) and fixing various MS bugs, but I'm sure I can squeeze in some RN Time!

Okay... I've hogged enough board space... off to crash so I can get up in 5 hours and start over!

Steph

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 12:21 am

Come on guys this is my topic! what about my theme Laughing

Joking aside If anyone does any paid work and its not over expensive I will be interested.
Cheers all
mrix

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 6:16 am

mrix, if you zip the theme up and PM me the link, I will look at it and try to have it fixed by this weekend. You can just leave a donation here at RavenNuke when I get done.

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 9:31 am

Quote:

mrix, if you zip the theme up and PM me the link, I will look at it and try to have it fixed by this weekend. You can just leave a donation here at RavenNuke when I get done.

Blimey thats really nice of you and very much appreciated, bit shocked to be honest Shocked

Cheers and thanks
mrix

Posted: Tue May 25, 2010 2:13 pm

Shocked? That's the spirit the RN Team members are made of and know for Wink

Involved Joined: Feb 03, 2006 Posts: 269

Bet I can fix it up Shocked

I've been knocking themes together now since about 2004, and I didn't learn about compliance standards until late 2008, I then attended college and couldn't believe how easy it was to make your code compliant.. its very simple really, and good practice, and like 64bitguy says there is lots of free tools to help you.

Since then I always make my themes and code complaint.

Making the theme compliant wouldn't take to long about an hour tops, its the content that would be the pain and you would have to do that.

If nuken doesn't sort you out PM me, same rule applies

Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2010 6:42 am

Just like to say a big thanks to nuken who rectified the issue I was having Very Happy

Also another big thanks to xGSTQ who has very kindly offered to make the theme far more compliant Very Happy

Donation as requested posted but for some reason I does not show up as I donated Confused

Anyway I have.

Really big thanks all.
mrix

Posted: Wed Jun 02, 2010 7:11 am

Raven updates donations manually Shocked

Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 2:54 am

Would just like to say thanks to xGSTQ for the time spent on my very old theme that had no end of errors Sad

But a huge thanks for your time in fixing a theme that I have used for at least 5 years Shocked

and a theme now I can stick and that I am very happy with

The theme loads ultra fast now
Very Happy

Big thanks and another donation heading towards this wonderful website / support.
Cheers and the biggest of thanks all.
mrix

Posted: Fri Jun 04, 2010 4:09 am

It only took me a few hours to get the theme and css compliant,

I just looked at your site, and there is still over 500 errors within your sites content..

A lot of them are within your Menu, why don't you try the NukeNav menu ?