Whoops’ and Uh-oh’s
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Apparently, the new site had some glitches, but I think all the bugs are worked out now. Alot of the problems were simple coding mistakes made as I transposed the old site into the new. The sort feature for our audio sermons was one such victim but should now be fixed. A similar problem occurred with the “Read full story” link for the News Snapshot but has also been fixed.
The biggest glitch was in the menu navigation system. The original format was a pure CSS menu (no javascript), but unfortunately, Gecko-based browsers (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox) were not handling the links properly in the menu. I took the menu back to the drawing board and changed it to use Javascript to compensate for Internet Explorer’s weaknesses, so that I could use list element hovers (Gecko-based browsers and Opera would still be pure CSS). Unfortunately, IE chimed in with a strange bug that caused the flyout menu to disappear whenever a link was hovered there - obviously not acceptable. I tried to narrow down the bug, but it seemed somewhat random, and I was frankly just tired of fighting with it. So, my final solution was to combine the two previous menus using PHP browser-sniffing. Internet Explorer users get the original menu (since it worked fine for them), and all other browsers get the second menu (since it only didn’t work in IE). Right now, if you view the site in both IE and another browser, you’ll see that the menus in fact look different. This is because I like the styling changes I made in developing the second menu, but I was frankly a little scared to mess with the original menu for fear that it might start breaking. This whole thing has wore me out, but one day, if I’m feeling froggy, I’ll make the Internet Explorer menu look like the other one.
There were also some minor bugs in the new Pastor’s Blog and Web Ministry Blog as well as the site search feature, but these were mostly presentational and were easily fixed. Like I said, I think I got them all, but if you guys out there notice anything, please send me an email and let me know.
