fisubsilver shadow: comments to news start too far down

sremick

Another issue with the fisubsilver shadow theme, this time has to do with comments to news articles.

If a home-page news article has commments, and you click on the article, the first comment isn't displayed directly below the article. The article itself remains fit between the left and right block columns, but the comments don't begin until the BOTTOM of the columns. Apparently the comments are trying to take up the space of the center column AND right column, so they start at the bottom of the right column, then extend from the right-hand side of the left column all the way to the right edge of the screen. If you have several blocks appearing in the right column, this can cause the comments to not begin until after a lot of whitespace after the article itself.

(am I making sense so far?)

I've noticed that if you click on a reply to a comment, on the new screen there IS no right block column. If this was the case with the first view, the problem would go away entirely. However, then you'd lose Related Links, Article Rating, and Options (email, print).

Any suggestions to make it fit?

mikem · 07-25-2003, 12:05 PM

If you check, this is related to ALL themes and is no way CONTROLLED by the theme.
Someone once asked this already and I gave them the info to remove those right blocks, which is the only way I have found to move the comments up to where they should be.

I'll try looking at the code more to see if there is a way to move the comments up and leave the right blocks.
But again, you can modify your theme until your blue in the face and it won't make a difference.

mikem

sremick · 07-27-2003, 10:41 PM

I managed to hack article.php to produce acceptible results. The trick was to do the following:

1) Locate the call to themearticle(). There's an echo command immediately following it. At the end of the code spit out by that echo, a td tag is opened. Edit this tag to include rowspan="2". So it looks like this:

Code:

echo "<table width=\"100%\" border=\"0\"><tr><td valign=\"top\" width=\"100%\">\n";
themearticle($aid, $informant, $datetime, $title, $bodytext, $topic, $topicname, $topicimage, $topictext);
echo "</td><td></td><td valign=\"top\" rowspan=\"2\">\n";

2) Edit the end of the file between the call to themesidebox and footer.php to look like this:

Code:

themesidebox($optiontitle, $optionbox);

echo "</td></tr><tr><td style=\"vertical-align: top;\">";
if ((($mode != "nocomments") OR ($acomm == 0)) AND ($articlecomm == 1)) {
    include("modules/News/comments.php");
}
echo "</td></tr></table>\n";
cookiedecode($user);

include ("footer.php");

Since it's been asked before, hopefully this will be of use to someone else as well, so I wanted to post what I did.