Question Discovered CSS problems in kunena forum default template.

I noticed some of the styling for the default template 'Blue Eagle' that comes with Kunena for joomla 1.7 wasn't working correctly. I was browsing the code to tweak things for my sites needs. I uncompressed the css from 1 line to full laid out and found problems throughout the code. After I replaced things like '"' with single quote, and spread the code out the forum took a completely different look. The little images starting working suddenly, the min-width sizes kicked in, Many things changed for the better. So I think whatever you guys are using to do these CSS files is actually breaking your code. The 'all on one line' thing is actually bad for css. Its not worth shaving a few kb for. And I found things like 'background-color' entries with a list of parameters intended for 'background' which caused it to break that line completely. The errors are scattered through the files. This is a critical issue that needs to be addressed. Your default styling is in fact broke on joomla 1.7.x. Just letting you know. I do enjoy this extension, but I hope issues like this don't become the 'rip in the beautiful painting' for this project.

Thanks for your feedback!

I'm not sure where you found a " string in the css files, I can't find any such string anywhere.

It should be noted that the default template is meant to function error-free on the default Joomla template. 3rd party templates introduce their own issues, and there are too many of those around to accommodate all of them. Essentially the Kunena developers use the base Joomla template as a basis so that they can spend more time developing features rather than trying to accommodate every 3rd party template our there. I spent many hours tweaking the default template to match my own site, and that's an unfortunate necessity for the base template of any complex Joomla component like Kunena.

The all-on-one-line thing is a recommendation by leading site evaluation tools (Yspeed, PageSpeed, etc). It gives a site a score boost and is therefore valuable in more ways than just saving a few KB. However the -min files used in Kunena are created by a script which may introduce some odd artifacts. These artifacts don't actually affect the rendering of Kunena pages when using the default template. Personally, I've found no issues from these -min files, with the exception of how annoying they are to edit. It's best to edit the full-length version of the file, then convert it to a -min version using any of the widely available web tools for that purpose, and then renaming that new file with -min on the end.

In the next version of Kunena (2.0, due very soon), the css files will be minified automatically by Kunena when they're first loaded, and the minified version will be automatically updated to reflect any changes in the full-length version. This will save a lot of hassle and will help tweaking the templates tremendously.

Hi, where did you find this code. I can't see it. Do you use any gzipper or other compressor on your site?

regards 810

G'day, lee8oi, welcome to Kunena and thank you for your feedback.

I assume that your comments related to Kunena version 1.7.1.

As you may gather, from the responses that precede mine, we're a little puzzled by your discovery. K 1.7 has been tested on many of sites and no-one in the testing team nor anyone within the community-at-large has reported the problems as you've described them. Minified CSS has been a feature of Kunena for over a year.

Different browsers, of course, render CSS in different ways. For example, there are differences in the behaviour between Internet Explorer and Firefox; in fact there are inconsistencies between different versions of the same browser: Internet Explorer is a classic example.

So, as a matter of general discussion about whether the CSS used in Kunena templates is a "good thing" or not, many of the views we have may differ and we welcome fresh perspectives from the community.

However, what may be more relevant to this discussion is the cause of the issues that you have reported. As we've already noted, Kunena 1.7 has been tested fairly extensively with J! 1.7 and we've not detected these issues before. I think it's also reasonable to conclude that, in testing K 1.7, the members of the testing team follow a standard approach to installing Kunena on their test sites. That procedure is documented in K 1.6 & K 1.7 Installation Guide . I don't know if that was the process you used but I recommend it to you for background reading.

Aside from all these things, we do not recommend directly editing "-min" files under any circumstances, no matter how "advisable" some people may had written on this forum that this is the way to rectify problems. As GoremanX wrote, it is better to edit the "clear text" version and then minify the CSS file afterwards.

I see. Well that makes sense then. So I suppose all the changes I made might get overwritten by the script you say generates the css min files? I didn't add any third party templates. Not sure where the artifacts might have gotten squeezed in....hmm. But...good to know it was just something on my end...Sorry to trouble you.

Just had the same problem; happened while editing Kuena CSS in Joomla admin. The <&quote;> is returned to Joomla in an expanded mode.

Original Kuena:
(&quot;../images/expand.gif&quot;)

After saving in Joomla:
("&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;../images/expand.gif&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;")

Joomla: Version 1.5.23
Kuena: 1.7.2

Quick solution: edit the css files in textedit/notepad etc.