Just a general idea... But most of the time when we see something like this displaying differently in IE and FF:

A) It's because IE is a pile of crap (I keed I keed! Well, actually no, IE sucks ;) )

B) More importantly it's possible you've got a glitch in your tags somewhere else in the page. I'd make sure to turn on the "Add Template Name in HTML Comments" in the ACP -> vBulletin Options -> General Settings then run the page in question though the W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/. Turn on all the options so you can see the source etc (and that's why you want the template names in HTML comments, makes it a LOT easier to track down where the problems are.

It's a major PITA, but keep hammering away at it till you get the page to validate and see if that doesn't solve your alignment issue, it prob will.

James and Susan

Depends on what you want? You determine the base width of the columns in the settings for USC, and if you put larger things (images) in, it will just make the column wider.

James and Susan

Susan figured out a way to do this yesterday. I'll try and get her to write up a series of steps, but the basics of what she did was to use feedburner to grab the RSS feed from vBlog, then used feedburner's buzzboost to generate a code snippet that could be dropped into a USC block.

She did some tweaking of the layout via css on our site, but it WORKS!

Take a look at our forum for a an example of how it looks.

James and Susan

Hi Frank

I am not using USC anymore, that is infact VBAdvanced which is a temporary measure. I am eventually going vbDrupal/Drupal once I get things all working correctly.

Cheers
Bruce

Tigratrus, thanks. when you say:
Specifically, run the page through the validator, what "page". This happens to be the forum home page...............Frank

So navigate to your forum home copy the url from your browser, and paste it into the W3C validator and click the button to tell it to validate.

If you haven't done this before, be aware that fixing the validation errors can be a major pain, it'll probably take a lot of digging though templates, and it's not something anyone can advise you on via a thread, way to many variables. If you're not comfortable using Firefox+Firebug and reading though the errors, you might want to see if you can find a coder that's willing to help.

If you have the basic background and/or are willing to spend some time on it, it's really just a matter of keeping at it till you find the source of the problems. In general you want to try and fix the earliest errors first, as you generally get cascade errors where a badly formed tag causes a whole series of errors below it. Ads are also a MAJOR source of validation errors, they often have & in them instead of the proper escape sequence of: & (don't forget the ; at the end either!). Good luck!

James and Susan

Tigratrus, found the error after validating. I had made a typo in closing the table tag. Duh. Also found a bunch of other stuff that I'll have a look at - not stuff that I had touched.

Thanks.

Speedway, thanks for replying.

Gratz!

It's a handy tool... And it's amazing how few sites (even really big ones) bother to check that their pages validate.

James and Susan

Just throwing it out there again:

Are there any sample code snippets of cool things to put in these sidebars? Display random members? Display top posters this month? Etc... with avatars?

I did a search through the thread and could not see this mentioned...

Only think this mod needs now is to conditionally enable left and right columns per style.

Some styles have a column built in (often with the login there).

It would be nice!

PS: I think a lot of the problems people have with getting the columns to show in non-standard styles might be resolved by trying different positions under the Column start point option... It was useful to me anyway.