After my post about release 2.6.4 yesterday and the CSS overlap issues that I was facing in certain scenarios, I did a lot of debugging and hunted down the cause for the problems I was facing. But before going there let me first explain the problem(s):
- Launch your blog with Suffusion as your theme in Firefox 3.0 or older. If you have 3rd level menus in your navigation bar (the ones that fly out to the right), you will see that the “>” indicator appears on a new line. This is very annoying to the user. Moreover it is upsetting to the developer, because this is Firefox, after all, and this behavior doesn’t occur in IE. Anyway, I found a way to fix this, so all is well. Mind you, the fix was extremely unintuitive and illogical.
- Now launch your blog on IE 6. Hover over a navigation bar item that has a drop-down. You will see all the levels beyond the first drop-down too appear on the page when you hover. This was an easy thing to fix, but needed research, nonetheless.
- Now, include a large number of tabs in the navigation bar of your blog. This should cause the navigation bar to “spill over” into a new line. Hover over something on the first line that creates a drop-down. Prior to version 2.6.4 this drop-down would have gone behind the second line in all browsers. I have seen other very well-known themes out there that exhibit the same broken behavior, BTW.
I fixed this issue for the good-behavior browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE8) in version 2.6.4. But older versions of IE still faced this problem. Given the share of IE worldwide, this was something that needed to be fixed, though the original intent was that you wouldn’t let the navigation bar spill over. After an elaborate hunt I came across Ruthsarian Layouts and that was of immense help in solving the problem. While the site itself didn’t explain how to tackle the problem, I went through their CSS, which is exceptionally well-detailed. The first fix I made helped resolve the issue for IE6, but IE7 still remained broken. Go figure. Eventually, from the same CSS on their site I figured out how to fix it for IE7. So the crisis has been averted!!
This cross-browser compatibility has pretty much been the fix for this version. Stay tuned for 2.6.5 – I don’t know when it will be approved.