Tag: code

When CSS Positioning Kills Functionality: Changing the Look of a WordPress Comments Form

When editing our theme, I had an interesting time editing the styling of the comments respond/reply form.

I was essentially modifying the WordPress TwentyEleven comments form, which looks like this:

WordPress TwentyEleven Comments Form

The form is huge though, especially since the blog posts we typically have are fairly short, I was afraid the comments form might end up bigger than the blog posts!

I figured the “quick” fix would be to simply lessen the amount of space between form fields. I did it the quick and dirty way, using:

#respond comment-form-field { margin-top: -30px }

Unfortunately, that broke the form fields. You could only activate the form field by clicking on particular areas of the field, which ended up being less than half of a field’s box.

It took me a while to figure out that the labels on each field would normally show above a field, but were repositioned on top of a form field. While this looks pretty, each label was taking up the equivalent space above a field; so if the whole field was repositioned to be closer to the above element, the space where the label would be overlaps the form field and thus block mouse behaviour. When a user tries to select the field, they’re actually selecting the paragraph element of the label:

Quick Fix Comments Form

In particular, this behaviour will happen any time an element overlaps another and its z-index is higher, literally positioned on top of the visible element below.

In the end, I restyled it with the labels above the fields so the gaps don’t look so big in between the fields. I also scaled it down somewhat, so that the end result is 243px shorter (in height) than the original and 123px shorter than even the ‘quick fix’ version. The end result:

Edited Comments Form

It still seems too large in comparison to a short post, so it will probably be restyled again later to be less wide as well and possibly scaled down even more. UPDATE: I wrote another blog post on further modifying the comments form, mostly using PHP.

Additional Information

For more on styling forms, check out WordPress’ article on Styling Theme Forms.

For those interested, here are the changes I made (classes that weren’t touched at all are not included):
[sourcecode language=”css” collapse=”true”]
#respond {
padding: 1.625em 0 1.625em 1.625em;
}
#respond input[type="text"],
#respond textarea {
(no change except removed text-indent)
}
#respond .comment-form-author,
#respond .comment-form-email,
#respond .comment-form-url,
#respond .comment-form-comment {
margin-top: -10px;
}
#respond .comment-form-author label,
#respond .comment-form-email label,
#respond .comment-form-url label,
#respond .comment-form-comment label {
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
left: -10px;
top: 4px;
padding: 3px 5px;
(mid-width removed)
}
#respond .comment-form-author .required,
#respond .comment-form-email .required {
font-size: 1.5em;
top: 33px;
}
/* added */
#respond .logged-in-as,
#respond .must-log-in,
#respond .comment-notes {
margin: 0.3em 0 1em;
 text-indent: 2em;
}
#respond .form-submit {
margin-top: -10px;
}
#respond input#submit {
font-size: 1.15em;
margin: 20px 0 0;
padding: 5px 15px;
left: 15px;
}
#reply-title {
font-size: 1.4em;
margin: 0;
(removed font-weight and line-height)
}
[/sourcecode]

Sometimes it’s the Browser, not your Code

As a beginner coder, I generally assume that if something goes wrong it’s my code. While it’s true that a website needs to be coded in such a way that it’s interoperable, sometimes the problem originates in the browser. This may seem obvious to any web programmer, but it wasn’t to me, mostly because the assumption really is, “I’m not an expert, so the mistake must be something in my code.”

Font-size Chrome Bug

In my case, I was having issues with font sizes, and this is such a basic part of CSS that it never occurred to me that it was a browser issue. Lo and behold, it turns out the current version of Chrome (17.0.963.79) rounds font-sizes to the nearest whole number, and I was doing calculations based on Chrome. Because of this bug, the site I was formatting looked very different.

For example, say I have:
h2 { font-size: 1.2em; }
h3 { font-size: 1.17em; }

Firefox: h2 = 19.2px , h3 = 18.7167px
IE9: h2 = 19.2px, h3 = 18.68(?)px
but Chrome: h2 and h3 = 19px

See jsFiddle example.

While these differences are so small you can barely tell in the example, you can imagine that on an entire website, it has a pretty big effect especially if it’s a base font size. In the end, I filed a Chrome bug report and it’s being looked at.

Sometimes it’s a Mystery

In our website’s book banner, there is a little styling trick in order to make it look nicer. What really got me was that it was using absolute positioning (which generally I avoid). However, if you make it relative, it no longer does what it’s supposed to.

Have something like this in the CSS:
span {
position: absolute;
top: 1em;
left: 1em;
border: 10px solid transparent;
border-right: 10px solid blue;
}
span+span {
position: relative;
left: 2em;
}
the HTML should then have an empty block: <span></span><span></span>

Result: results in one arrow and one trapezoid
If you want to play with it, it’s on jsfiddle

So far, I haven’t found an answer, so I’ve simply recoded it to make it work in the new layout. Now the strange thing is that it works on MAC, but breaks using the same browsers on Windows.

MediaWiki Image Link Workaround

So, in playing around with my user page and trying to make it look pretty, I found out that you can link an image to an internal or external link like you might normally do instead of the File: page. That’s great, but the problem I found was that except for the basic internal and external link, when you linked the image to something that inherently has a little icon next to it (e.g. mailto link gives you a little e-mail icon), then it would show the icon next to the image (see below left).

So, it turns out that there is a workaround to hide the icon (see above right). You can add this bit of code to the main.css file:

#bodyContent .plainlinks a {
background: none repeat scroll 0 0 transparent !important;
padding: 0 !important;
}

Or if the CSS Extension is installed, you can hack it by using the same code, but you’ll probably want it to be context dependent if you can.