Dr. E's dashboard

I had this same problem too. When I looked at the CSS in Firefox Web Developer, I saw that the PBWiki stylesheet had a number of declarations that were not in the stylesheet for the Minimalist skin.

They all start with: #displaycontent div.sidebar_v2. When I added them to my custom css with my settings I was successful in styling my sidebar.

I am remember that bit of CSS now. With !important, if two identical selectors are used, then the last !important gets priority.

http://vupublictest.pbwiki.com/CSSExa...

And you're right, as a skin-designer and web-developer, Firebug has saved my life many times. Too bad IE doesn't have anything as useful.

Vu,
As I should have said, I am not an CSS expert, in fact trying to debug the issue on mine was my 3rd foray into CSS.

See https://vs1.pbwiki.com/common_both-v0...
which I am pretty sure is before my CSS. Notice the "important" overriders. I am right in saying the first one it hits sticks aren't I?

Also see thread: http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki/top... toward the bottom.

My advice would be to use firefox + firebug and see what css attributes are being enforced and by which CSS.

Actually jac2, I don't think I've seen !important being used in our built-in CSS very often. It's more likely that a complex order of cascades is going on and the most simple version of a declaration won't work. For example, let's say PBwiki defines h1's like this (I actually don't remember, and it's different for each skin anyway):

#wrapper-root #root div#displaycontent h1 { color:green; }

For you to get the header changed to red, you'd have to be AS specific, or MORE specific. Otherwise, this declaration would get precedence. For example, even the following would fail:

#wrapper-root #root #displaycontent h1 { color:red; }

You would have all the same steps, but since you did not define the element type for #displaycontent, it's not as good.

Furthermore, a problem where the blame is with us a little more is when we link our CSS after the user CSS, allowing our's to have the last say. For example, if we did something like:

<link href="/f/wiki.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<link href="sidebar.css" rel="stylesheet" />

Even if you DID get the declaration with the right priority/specificity, we would still be overriding it. So that's why with any user skinning, if you are having trouble, the best bet to try first is to use the !important keyword yourself, since we use it sparingly if at all and you can then override the built in styles.

Sorry for the longwindedness!

This sounds like a problem I reported ages ago. It was that somewhere in the nested CSS's used by the developers of PBWIKI they had used an "important" tag, which AFAICS stops the property from being modified by later CSS's. My problem was that I couldn't change "Header1" font size and weight. It worked fine in the CSS editor, but ignored in the live WIKI.

After a lot of digging around and using firebug to work out what effective CSS was actually effecting properties I got to the bottom of it. Reported, but still a problem on our V1 wiki.

Not sure it if is the same, but sounds similiar.

Hi,

Can you tell me what code you are using for the SideBar? It's a tricky bugger...In particular, sometimes you just have to follow those declarations with the !important keyword.

#SideBar, .sidebar_v2 {
width:150px !important
}

This sets the width of the SideBar to 150 pixels, forcing it no matter what other CSS declaration thinks it has priority. My selector ("#SideBar, .sidebar_v2") is meant to be compatible to both versions of the SideBar as well.

Hi Dr. E.

I'm sorry for the problems. I'll have to ask our expert on this tool.
He may be available tomorrow.

Sounds like a problem we had on another wiki, where SideBar code got messed up and left a tag open.

Glad you sorted it out!

I fixed it. Somehow deleting and recreating the sidebar fixed this.

Dr. E -I have deleted the corrupt sidebar page. I seem to be doing more cleanup after my fellow students than getting any actual work done. Sigh! – Bruchs, on May 14, 2008 20:25

Hi Dr. E- I think you have something different going on. Have you edited the sidebar recently?

I seem to be having the same problem at trailmaps.pbwiki.com - all the pages appear blank, but they are showing up in the sidebar (the text). The editor still works, you just don't see the pages.

To help you out, the wiki key to edit is maps - and of course this seems to work just fine (editing that is). I am at a loss as to what is actually happening - there seems to be nothng wrong with the styles..

Well, think of it this way: The happier you are with PBwiki, the more you'll use it, and the more you use it, the happier PBwiki will be :) Sharing your ideas lets us know what you want, and probably what other people want too. So keep 'em coming!

There are probably other free tools (PHP and My SQL based) that would incorportate well into wiki sites. The ability to incorporate these tools like the spreadsheet and the calendar are incredibly useful and greatly enhance the utility of the wiki. There are some potential obstacles, the major one I see is that most of the tools use a different login and authetication schema and to be truly useful and integrated would need to have the same schema.

However - the ability to embed something like a time sheet (as in ActiTime) into a wiki page that is for a specfic project means that people working the project could simply go to that page to enter their time and all the work is done centric to the wiki.

I think the folks doing wiki site as a service have a tiger by the tail. Somebody is going to figure out this entire software as a service paradigm and then the rules of software will be changing quite a bit. (BTW - I have been very happy at the responsiveness of the the folks at PBWiki to at least listen to ideas)

Thanks for the feedback!