Just a note - thanks to a commenter (thanks, Rafa!), I hadn't noticed that I left an important piece of PHP out of my Orange Crush theme. It's a simple line - a bitty mistake...but huge consequences if there's some certain adjustments you'd like to make to the theme. The download is now updated - here as well as in the Wordpress Theme Viewer. But just in case you've downloaded it before today, you should know you're missing something in the header. If you don't want to re-download the whole thing for just the one line, simply copy this line: <?php wp_head(); ?> and add it right before the closing </head> tag in the header.php file. ...

Have I ever mentioned how much I love a challenge? I love to play with CSS. Anyway, there was a question on one of my email lists the other day, and I was sure I could accomplish it. Bascially, someone wanted a site layout where it was your basic 3-column thing. Content in the center and two sidebars flanking it. Simple enough. But the trick was - they wanted the two sidebars to always have the same length as each other - no matter which one was the longest. The center content section would have nothing whatsoever to do with the length of the two sidebars. Oh, and no "faux columns" tricks, or javascript to be used. Could this be done using straight up CSS? I thought so, but I could forsee some problems with it. Wouldn't you know it - I was right.

Well, amazingly, I've had several people email me and ask me "How'd you do that?" - in regards to the navigational menu on the left side of the screen there. It's actually very easy. It's based upon HTML Dog's Son of Suckerfish dropdowns. The nav list over there is probably about as simple an implementation of the SOS menus as you can get. Since it's based from something that is fairly well-known (and widely used) I'm not going to bother to explain a whoile bunch about what makes it work and all that. You can read up on the HTML Dog website on that all you like :) But I will post the bare-bones code that I've used on this site, and you can copy and edit it to fit your own needs as you so desire. The code below does have some "prettiness factor" built in, but it's very basic and easily changed. So, without further ado...

So, you've implemented the Son of Suckerfish dropdown menu on your cool new site design. And it just so happens that you have an awesome little piece of Flash on the site - something to add to the look in a small way without looking like a cheesy animated GIF. It's in a nice spot, right below your new dropdown menu. But, hold the phone! You've now discovered that the dropdowns fall behind the Flash object. You double-check your CSS, and you've got the Flash object set with a z-index of 0, and the dropdowns at 1000 - but the dropdown is still falling behind the Flash. What gives?