What's the best way to add a shadow effect to sides of page as seen right here?

[eJM]

What about the wrapper I mentioned? If you want to contain the background to only the area covered by the header and down to the footer, then the HTML and BODY areas are out of the equation. But first let me explain something about the boxes you put your CSS into in the Style Manager.

The BODY area of the Style Manager already has a place to put the background CSS - don't duplicate it by adding:

background: #xxyyzz url(images/misc/image.gif) top center repeat-y

to the Extra CSS attributes. They aren't extra attributes. But anyway, don't put your background image there at all. To do this the way you want, you have to add a wrapper DIV around the area you want the shadow sides to appear. Then assign that DIV an ID labeled wrapper (or whatever you wanna call it). Then the CSS for that ID will be applied to that whole DIV. You'll need something else for the bottom shadow too. Put the CSS for wrapper and the container for the shadow bottom image in the Additional CSS box at the bottom of the Style Manager.

The CSS MIGHT look like this:

#wrapper {background: #xxyyzz url(images/misc/image.gif) top center repeat-y;}
#shadow-bot {width: nnnpx; height: nnpx; padding: 0; margin: 0 auto;}

Replace the n's with the proper sizes. Then the HTML you will have to add to your templates. If you look at the source of the page, it will look something like this:

<div id="wrapper">
the area of your forum that is "wrapped" in the shadow sides goes here
</div>
<div id="shadow-bot"><img src="path-to-forum/images/misc/image.gif" alt="" /></div>

The wrapper DIV would probably start before the first TABLE in the header template and end either before or after $ad_location[ad_footer_end] in the footer. Your shadow bottom container would be directly after that.

Caveat: I don't have a link to your forum to check what's what. Besides, this is a lot of work I have spent a number of years trying to learn how to do. Beyond this kind of help here in the forum, you may want to hire someone to do this for you, or continue to do a lot of research and trial and error to get it the way you want.

R'gards,

Jim