I’ve been spending quite a few hours lately trying to refine a pure CSS flyout menu for a clients website recently. I wanted to use CSS because I didn’t want to mess with the html that the dynamic menu I was using (NAVT) output. So I went with a nice one from CSS play. Nice and basic, pure CSS, even for IE6, although, it required a table to be placed around nested un-numbered lists, which meant screwing around with NAVT PHP, which I wasn’t real keen on. Today I stumbled upon the holy grail. It’s a tidy little htc file with some javascript, that, in short, allows any tag have a hover option within IE6, allowing your nice CSS flyout menus to work in IE6, fantastic stuff. It’s called Whatever:hover and I highly recommend this little gem, it takes the stress out of IE6 optimisation in an XHTML world… wow that was lame.

Predominanty IE6, but IE7 is the still bratty, yet more mature older brother. Pure CSS flyout menus are a beautiful thing, they work, and you can adapt them to anything without having to edit any html. Unless of course you want it to work with IE6. I’m currently building a site for a client that needs to be entirely CMS based, pages, navigation bars, everything. So as I mentioned in an earlier post I’m using Wordpress, along with a very handy sidebar navigation menu called NAVT. A dynamic navigation list plugin that allows you to make a list of links ranging from Wordpress pages, meta links, blog categories and external links, which is great for a Wordpress site that is more a home page than a standard blog. Anyway it uses unordered lists to layout the links and you can nest links underneath other links and whatnot. This made it very easy to make a fully customisable flyout menu that they could add and remove links and pages to without any real hassle. It’s basically all done, except for the IE6 compatibility. I know need to mess around with the NAVT code and place conditional statements in certain spots so that it will work, such fun.  Other than the IE6 debacle, I’m pretty happy with how the site has turned out, and hopefully within the next week or so it will be in the portfolios page.

Having not done any web development in a while I think I’d forgotten why I hate IE so damn much. Stupid rendering issues of a WC3 compliant page, just so damn annoying. All I can say is, praise jebus for the <!–[if IE]> workaround

Wordpress is now my CMS of choice for any freelance work I do. Once you get the hang of developing themes for Wordpress, it’s incredibly easy, and you can pretty much lay it out however you want, my first theme was simply the one you’re looking at now, basic, but functional. I finished developing a theme for a school website I’m doing at the moment and I got it together as smooth as if I was building a static page. Usually when I’m designing a layout for a web page, I just mock the thing up in Fireworks first, get it looking how I want, that probably takes the longest, I have trouble getting a layout I feel good about. Once I’m happy I slice up the images I need and then go write the code (don’t worry I don’t export the Fireworks HTML, yuck!). I think the main thing I like about Wordpress is the pure simpleness of the administration section, it’s basic as you like, and should be easy to show not so savvy people how to use it. A lot of people I’ve shown the Joomla admin section to have looked at it a bit wide eyed, but Wordpress is a lot more straight forward. Until recently I thought it was just a blog application, but if you wanted to, you could ignore that altogether and just setup a site with editable static pages. I’m almost done with the current freelance Wordpress site I’m doing at the moment and I’ll plug it when I’m done.

If you want to learn how to develop your own Wordpress theme, I recommend the Cyberhackz tutorial, it’s straight forward and to the point, and honestly, once you’ve done one, you’re ready to go. One suggestion I’d have is to follow the tutorial with an XHTML layout already developed, and cut and past the segments you need from that into the segmented theme files, works quite well. After that, keep yourself a blank basic theme for reference.

Launched my browser this morning and whammo, digg has significantly updated their iGoogle widget, it’s quite fancy.

I was wondering if they would add images to this thing. Happy Days