iris lines designs

The following rule was in the stylesheet for a Joomla component I use: 

    div.thumbs_div a:hover, a:active, a:focus{
    background-color: transparent !important;
    }

Do you spot the syntax error which caused me no end of grief?

I finally did!

This topic came up at Joomla! Day New England -- how to get template styles to show up in jce styles dropdown and to affect the content in the editor window.

For some time now I have been installing the JCE editor for my clients to use on their Joomla sites.   And each time I have to make a decision about how to configure the editor, because this can be done in different ways and "It Depends..."  is always the right answer.

Here are a few possible issues:

Using conditional statements you can control whether your template creates a div and module position for a left or right sidebar depending on whether a module exists for any given page.   But this does not cause the content to stretch to fill that available space when no sidebar modules are present.

It IS possible to use conditional statements in the opening php block of your template to set values of variables which are then used in the template to create divs with different classes depending on the modules present.

For this example I'm using a liquid design with a left column width of 20%, and a right column width of 30%.   Left and center columns are floated left, right column is floated right. Two background images are used to create the faux columns. The content area will be either 50%, 70%, 80% or 100% depending on the presence of modules for the left or right columns.

I add these 4 lines to the opening php block:
if($this->countModules('left + right') > 0) $layout="50";
if($this->countModules('right') <= 0) $layout="80";
if($this->countModules('left') <= 0) $layout="70";
if($this->countModules('left + right') <= 0) $layout="100";

and in my html I reference that variable wherever needed like this:

/*The next set of styles were added to solve the Firefox outlining the edges of
links in the navigation bar. */
a {
user-focus: none;
outline : none;
-moz-user-focus: none;
-moz-outline: none;
behavior: url(/includes/userfocus.htc)
}
a:focus {
user-focus: none;
outline : none;
-moz-user-focus: none;
-moz-outline: none;
behavior: url(/includes/userfocus.htc)
}
/*end of Firefox border fix.*/