Couple questions having to do with spacing and boxes

[Craig]

Hey Guys,

I am new to oscommerce and im trying to modify my site. I'm trying to figure out is how to change the vertical spaces of the left column. I want the boxes to be flush with one another. Also I took the left and right corners off by using the transparent pic. But my new products for sept. box is kinda screwed up. It has gray corners and the orange header doesn't span all the way across. Heres the site if you wanna to visualize what im talking about.
www.pcexclusive.com

Thanks Alot
~Craig

[wenzlerpaul]

Find this code on your pages like index.php etc.

<!-- body //-->
<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3">
  <tr>
    <td width="<?php echo BOX_WIDTH; ?>" valign="top"><table border="0" width="<?php echo BOX_WIDTH; ?>" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<!-- left_navigation //-->
<?php require(DIR_WS_INCLUDES . 'column_left.php'); ?>
<!-- left_navigation_eof //-->
    </table></td>
<!-- body_text //-->

on this portion:

    <td width="<?php echo BOX_WIDTH; ?>" valign="top"><table border="0" width="<?php echo BOX_WIDTH; ?>" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">

change cellpadding="2" to cellpadding="0", this will cause all of those vertical spaces between the boxes to disappear, you will need to do this to all pages where the same codes appear.

next, inside your infobox, find corner_left.gif and corner_right_left.gif, get a spacer or blank.gif just like what you did on the other boxes and rename them as the ones I mentioned above, this will correct your problem with the new products corner issue...

I just don't know if I got your problems answered, if not please clarify...

Paul

[Craig]

Wenzlerpaul your the man, Everything worked as you said it would.

I still have one problem you can maybe tackle. I used an image for one the headers of the left boxes. I also set the width of the column to the width of the image. But when I refresh the page the box is there, but the text is missing and the width of the column is larger then the image. You have any idea why thats going on? The think I know why the text isn't showing up but im not sure why is automatically resizing the column.

Thanks Again,
~Craig

[wenzlerpaul]

Craig,

I am not really sure what you are referring to but I will attempt to answer it, the image you are referring is the one above the manufacturer box (this is the way I understand it), if so, you just need little html tweaking on this one.

your code is like this:

<table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr>
    <td height="26" class="infoBoxHeading"><img src="images/pixel_trans.gif" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1"></td>
    <td width="100%" height="26" class="infoBoxHeading"><img src="images/web/left022.gif"></td>
    <td height="26" class="infoBoxHeading" nowrap><img src="images/pixel_trans.gif" border="0" alt="" width="11" height="14"></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Notice that you have <img src="images/web/left022.gif"> listed there where in it should be like

<td width="100%" height="26" class="infoBoxHeading" background="images/web/left022.gif">text here</td>

just try to find where you should put it, you seem to know fairly how to edit the script so I hope I answered you correct and gave you as much idea.

Paul

[Craig]

I edited the English.php and changed define('BOX_HEADING_MANUFACTURERS', '<img src="images/web/left022.gif">');/*'Manufacturers');*/ I tried changing it to define('BOX_HEADING_MANUFACTURERS', '<img src="images/web/left022.gif">'.'test');/*'Manufacturers');*/ but all it does is bump up my image some and show test below the image. So it works but it doesn't go over the image. You happen to know why this could be?

Thanks,
~Craig

[wenzlerpaul]

I think you should better do this in the php files inside include/boxes, I don't think you will be able to achieve this through the language file, unless you may find a way, at least you could share, another approach I could suggest is why not write the text exactly on the image itself? I see you are good in image, so instead of putting an text over an image by way of overlapping, do it in your photoshop and put the text into the image like your home, about us, shop images at the top and do that english.php the way you are doing it now...

hope it helps,
Paul

[Craig]

I was actually thinking about just editing the image by adding a text layer. The only problem with that, is that your images gets larger and increases the overall size of your site, lowering load time. I'm going to try and edit it using the boxes.php instead of the English.php. If anyone is interested in changing the header of your boxes to an image file through English.php, this is how you do it:

You open your English.php file and find the box you want to change, for example define('BOX_HEADING_MANUFACTURERS', 'Manufacturers');

What you do is change that code to look something like this:
define('BOX_HEADING_MANUFACTURERS', '<imgsrc="images/yourimage">');

and then you have your own image there.

Hope this helps anyone who happens to stumble on this post

Thanks,
~Craig

[wenzlerpaul]

Craig,

I got one more suggestion, since those box are controlled via css with this class="infoBoxHeading", why don't you just assign the image via css, this way, all those boxes with the same css tag in them will have the image, haven't tried it yet but I surely think it will work.

Paul

[Craig]

I actually used the cascading stylesheets method which I found on wiki.oscommerce.com because when you do it that way, you can edit each box independently of the others. If anyone is looking for the best overall way of customizing each individual box I recommend the method you can find on wiki.oscommerce.com under the boxes category.

~Craig