Seeking fix for The Morning After issues

  • vivianpaige · Member ·

    Having worked with The Morning After theme for several weeks now, I find myself having to constantly adjust the positioning of the placement of the Asides and Featured Posts areas depending on what is included there and what is in the latest post.

    What I wanted was to have the Asides located above the Featured Posts instead of below them, as in the original theme. However, the spacing between the three elements changes every time I post something.

    Is it simply not possible in this theme to have them move as necessary? If so, I’ll have to revert back to their original positioning. If not, can somebody point me to what I need to do to fix this?

    Also, if it is possible to keep the relative positioning of the elements, there are two other problems.First, I had to set the width of the Featured Posts area background in order to keep the background color from bleeding over into the sidebar, which seemed weird to me as the original CSS didn’t have this problem.

    Second, when the length of the left side of this page is longer that the widget areas, it simply overlaps the background image, instead of the widget area lengthening to match.

    I’d appreciate any help from the CSS gurus on this. And yes, I know you guys have your plates full.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • vivianpaige · Member ·

    For reference purposes, here is the code that I had in my CSS (until moments ago) that I was using to reposition the items. 

    #home_featured {
position:relative;
top:375px;
width:470px;
}

#home_asides {
position:relative;
top:-950px;
}

    I’ve removed it because I simply cannot make the adjustments every time something posts.

  • devblog · Member ·

    I was playing with this last night, and unless my CSS is getting rusty (which probably is), although I did manage to automatically adjust the position of the Quick Hits box based on the height of the Latest Post, I could not do the same for the Featured Posts box… position based on the Quick Hits height.

  • vivianpaige · Member ·

    Then you need to get unrusty :)

    Interesting that you were able to do one but not the other. Probably just another problem with the way this theme is written :(

    If you get a chance, please share how you did the positioning that worked. I can tell you that the Featured Posts box will overlap the Quick Hits (Asides) box if it isn’t a certain size itself (that is, the Featured Posts box).

  • devblog · Member ·

    I made some more tests, and if the Featured Posts content is longer, then it will affect the position of the Quick Hits box… so my code is not good either…

    This is what I had:

    #home_left{
clear: both; position: relative;
}

#latest_post {clear: both; margin-bottom: 100px;}

#home_featured {
border: solid 1px #00f; float: right;
position: relative;  top: 250px;
}

#home_asides {
border: solid 1px #f00; float: left; position: relative; top: -1200px;
margin: 0 0 20px; clear: both;
}

    Don’t mind the “border” properties. I always add them to help me see the boundaries of the element(s) I’m working with.

    BTW, I’d recommend you to not use “em” units for paddings or margins. I explain why in another post.

  • vivianpaige · Member ·

    Interesting. Like I said, I think there is something seriously wrong with the underlying theme files.

    And if you see “em” units in padding or margins in my code, it’s because it was already there. I don’t ever use that.

  • vivianpaige · Member ·

    Now that we have official staff support for CSS, I am requesting that they weigh in on this and let me know specifically if there is a way to reposition the asides above the featured posts area.

    Thanks in advance.

  • vivianpaige · Member ·

    Still hoping for staff support

  • designsimply · Member ·

    There is not anything wrong with the theme files, it’s just that the theme is designed in a way that doesn’t allow you to easily do what you want to do. The Morning After theme is designed to display #latest_post, #home_featured, and #home_asides inline one after the other. You could rearrange them with CSS, but as you already found, the heights would need to be fixed or they will overlap one another depending on the content length of each element.

    I looked for a way to rearrange positioning for variable height elements with css only, but I didn’t see a simple way to do it. If you wanted to customize beyond what css updates can do for a given theme, then you would need to switch to a WordPress.org setup in order to get full access to the html code to change the order of the elements since you can’t change html

  • vivianpaige · Member ·

    Thanks for looking at this. I couldn’t even figure out how to make the heights fixed. But if there is no simple way to rearrange the variable height elements, I’ll just leave them alone.

    So, I’m still searching for the perfect theme. I guess it just doesn’t exist. :(

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