[David Chu]

Hi,
This kind of question creates lengthy arguments in CSS forums. That's why I don't hang out in them anymore. Lots of grim alpha grammarians in those. 🙂

You're right to think about that, though. You could do it either way. If you look at the latest Genesis Sample Child theme, they are doing "rem", which is neither of those! Rems is CSS3, and is like Ems, but does not inherit an Ems setting from a parent item, so it's easier to control, many people find. I really like rem now that I'm using it.

I would suggest checking out that theme for ideas. It's extremely well thought-out, and is a big improvement from the previous Genesis Sample theme, IMO. They will have a rem setting for an item, and a pixel setting right under it. This is so that terrible browsers like IE7 can still render a decent page even though they can't understand "rem". I find that I barely need to make any changes at the different device levels.

Sometimes if I just have one change at some size, I'll use a quickie percentage, but "rem" would work equally well, as would "em". But you can still try pixels if you want - any of those can be made to work. My bias is towards rem.

Hope that helps some. Others may chime in.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Hi, Some CSS changes needed to do that.
Here's the code that handles the hover:

.genesis-nav-menu li a:hover, .genesis-nav-menu li li a:hover {
  background-color: #A6D045;
}

I added a bit to have the current item have that same background. I coded this quickly by looking at your HTML, so it would need to be checked, but it should work. See how it addresses the current stuff:

.genesis-nav-menu li a:hover, .genesis-nav-menu li li a:hover, .genesis-nav-menu li.current-menu-item {
  background-color: #A6D045;
}

For changing the link color, you could add a color line to this. I stuck a color line there as an example - blue is probably not optimal, so you'd need to replace that. 🙂 I actually wouldn't change the color myself.

.genesis-nav-menu a {
  display: block;
  padding: 1.5rem 1.25rem;
  position: relative;
  color: blue;
}

And adjust to taste. Hope that helps!
Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Rob,
I'm glad that worked! It's true, sometimes one can only get the result one wants by changing markup. In fact, I suppose if that weren't true, then the web would be more boring, with everything having the exact same format.

In any case, if either of us were going to make the leap to Genesis 2, we'd do a backup anyway. 🙂 And many people, as we saw during the 1.9 update, didn't bother, and got spanked.

Best, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Sunil,
Have you checked the plugins' homepages to see if they have updates? Also, I know an easy way to test this.

In the wordpress.org plugin site, pick a plugin, and then instead of installing the latest version, go to the Developers tab. Find an old version of the plugin, and download it. Install it using the upload method. You don't even have to activate it. Then wait a bit, a few hours or a day, and see if you get the update notice.

If not, that's when further investigation could be done, questioning the host, etc.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

No, Genesis would not impede plugin updates at all, I'm 98% certain. The only exception to that might be if your Genesis install has been damaged so much that the site doesn't work.

If I were you, I would ask your host about that. Some hosting is always problematic for WordPress updates, and in that case, you could do manual plugin installs if necessary.

Good luck, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Hi,
There are various ways to do this, but none that take 10 seconds.

I would most likely use a CSS method. I would use the Custom Body Class on the page (down in the Layout Settings near the bottom of the Page). Then I would upload an image to the Genesis folder or just to the Media Library, and then write some CSS to connect the class to the image.

#wrap is kind of everywhere on your site. So as an example I might write something like this after sticking a class of "jeffrey" on the body class for his page:

.jeffrey #content-sidebar-wrap {
  background: url(/wp-content/themes/executive/images/jeffrey.jpg) left top no-repeat;
}

So that's one basic recipe you could follow, obviously adjusting for your set-up, and wherever you want the background to go.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Hi There, Rob!
That's a good question, and I had to think about it. Although I like to do nearly everything with hooks and filters... 🙂

For this, I think you'll want to copy header.php and footer.php from the /genesis folder into your child theme. Then open up those beauties, and in there you'll see where you could code in what you're describing. I believe that should take care of it.

Truthfully, most of the time I'd probably find a way to manage this purely through CSS without the extra HTML. Just as I enjoy hooks, I prefer not to play with any template files when I can avoid it. And there may be other structural hooks lying about that I haven't run across yet. Some super theme geek might chime in on that, or a question about that to tech support might bear fruit.

But your way is certainly a viable alternative, I'm quite sure. I think the only pitfall for that is if the next version of Genesis comes out with brand new structures for the header and footer, which is possible with the advent of HTML5 in Genesis. So you'll want to keep your eye on that.

Do let me know how you make out.

Best, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Great! Although there's all sorts of cool styling in there, sometimes things need to be un-styled or re-styled. 🙂

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Perfecto! 🙂

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Mike,
It looks great in my browser. But yes, you could easily bump into a limit. Notice the following blocks of code. The first is giving you a zone that's about 1/3 of the wrap area of the header. And the 2nd block is holding your menu. It's much wider than needed with that many menu items, about 2/3 of the header area. So they might fight each other.

So you can play with the width figures for these two blocks to get what you want.

#title-area {
  float: left;
  overflow: hidden;
  width: 30%;
}

#header .widget-area {
  float: right;
  width: 65%;
}

Best, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

The simplest way to make something akin to this is to use the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin. I have one designer client who goes totally crazy with this, and makes different sidebar content for every page. (To me, that's very extreme.) 🙂 The only limitation of that is that it's, well, sidebars, and not other types of widgets.

So when I want to stick something into a some other area on a page, I'll use Custom Fields for that, and then use hooks and functions to get that into the template. Unfortunately, that's well beyond the scope of a short answer, but tuts may be helpful for putting that together.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Hi,
No worries, it's all good, just the wrong color text. This bit of CSS will give you black text. It will override the white color that's set in the CSS for the submit button.

#inner input[type="submit"] {
  color: #000;
}

Cheers, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

🙂

If you just needed to hide your site rather than redirect, I would have suggested one of those "under construction" style plugins that only allow the logged in person to navigate the site.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Thanks, Pat!
Glad it helped! btw, the site's design looks very nice!
Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

You bet, John. 🙂 I'm definitely a CSS hacker, but I had to really examine that one... never seen one exactly like it.

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Yup. 🙂 Interesting problem.... the links just need some "weight". I can give you a recipe - I think you have unique code for each link, so you'll need to adapt it. This bit is for the first link.

Note the block of CSS below. Somewhere amongst these lines, add the statement

 display: block;

#subnav li.copywriting a, #subnav li.copywriting a:hover, .menu-secondary li.copywriting, .menu-secondary li.copywriting a, .menu-secondary li.copywriting a:hover {
  background: url("images/hotelcopywriting.png") no-repeat scroll 0 0 transparent;
  height: 214px;
  margin-right: 0;
  text-indent: -9999px;
  width: 125px;
}

Best, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Hi,
That was a strange little brain-teaser. I finally found it.... I'm not sure why exactly, without doing more testing. I think it's some interaction with the link over the title area.

See where it says "margin" below? Change that to "padding".

#header {
  height: 130px;
  margin: 25px 0 5px;
  width: 960px;
}

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Hi,
There are various redirect plugins, but they may be overkill, or not do that particular thing. How about this method.

Cheers, Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Hi,
I like the Streamline comments, too. They're "lefty", I'd say... are you a lefty? 🙂 Anyhow... here are 2 versions of what looks like the CSS code in question. The difference is that Streamline has a big negative left margin, pulling things to the left.

Prose:

.comment-list li ul li {
  list-style-type: none;
  margin-right: -16px;
}

Streamline:

.comment-list li ul li {
  margin: 25px 0 0 -30px;
}

For the comment background on Prose, I think that playing with this would do it:

.thread-alt, .thread-even {
  background-color: #F5F5F5;
}

Dave

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

[David Chu]

Great! 🙂

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Dave Chu · Custom WordPress Developer – likes collaborating with Designers

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