[martin05rc]

Problem solved!

This took two weeks of digging through code and figuring things out. In the end the solution is ridiculously simple, which reminds me of something an ex-boss of mine used to say: The second person who saw the wheel thought it was obvious.

Quick recap:

vb version 4.x.x
To achieve a fixed-width, say, 960px, and centered layout the common advise is to set three stylevars as follows:

doc_width = 960px

doc_margin
Right = auto
Left = auto


This works for all browsers except IE7 and IE8 in compatibility mode. No testing was done with IE versions prior to IE7. On IE7/8c some of the page elements become disjoint from the rest of the page and the layout decomposes as the browser's width is modified.

Solution:

Change the above stylevars as indicated.

Edit "vbulletin-chrome.css" template to add the code noted below at the very top of the file:

@charset "UTF-8";
/* CSS Document */

/* FIX IE7/8C FIXED-AND-CENTERED LAYOUT PROBLEM */
body { 
     position: relative;
}
/* END IE7/8C FIX */

/**
* CHROME: HEADER, NAVBAR, BREADCRUMB, FOOTER
*/

That's it. Obvious, isn't it?

Not so when you look at the problem without knowledge of internals. To make things even more interesting the available documentation was of no help and my paid vB support was only good to tell me that either this was an obscure problem that they couldn't bother to work on or that I had to go to vBulletin.org because this was a custom mod (you know, like running vBulletin.org on v3.6 fixed-and-centered is custom).

It was obvious that I was on my own. Even my skin vendor gave up. I had to tear apart several CSS files and templates, figure out the structure of both and muck around with positioning settings of various layers of <div>'s before realizing that the problem was at the very top.

Two weeks later, here we are. As a brand new vB customer this experience felt --to be very kind-- far less than ideal on all fronts. I have no choice but to use vB at this point as we've gone too far with development and setup. I am currently considering switching our board to IPBoard within the next six months. The primary reason for this is that again, as a brand-spanking-new customer, we felt like we were simply left to fend for ourselves which cost us at least two weeks, if not three. I would have done better with phpBB --probably better support and eveything is free-- but we went with the paid option for what we thought would be real support from the authors. Wrong.

Oh, yes, today I was told that the problem does not exist in the upcoming v4.0.4 release. However, they have no idea why the problem was fixed or how. It's just a side-effect of some of the other stuff done/fixed in 4.0.4. Groovy.

I sincerely hope that as we start running the site I'll get to experience redeeming values of both the software and the support team. So far I am not impressed.

Anyhow...

The above fix seems to work fine across all browsers and platforms I was able to test (about 20 machines with different configurations and several virtual machines setup for testing). I'll run more exhaustive testing tomorrow but I think this is it.


Thanks,

-Martin