Have you ever had an image show up on your website which is to large, causing problems for your WordPress theme?   This is especially common for WordPress blogs that have multiple authors, where some authors or guest posters may not know how big they can make the images.

Fixing this is incredibly easy with this CSS hack!    All you need to do is take the following code and place it in your stylesheet, setting a maximum width for your images:

.postarea img {
max-width: 500px;
height: auto;
}

In the above code snippet, you’ll want to replace postarea with whatever div ID or CLASS your theme uses for the content.   You can also adjust the 500px to the maximum width you’d like for your images to be.

Note: This hack may not work on some versions of Internet Explorer.

This guest post was written by V Scott Ellis of Blackbox Technologies, a business that helps companies to maximize their web presence.  If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

One of the more common issues with embedding a flash object on your home page (or any page for that matter) is that if it is near the navigation and you have CSS drop-down menus, then you may find your drop-down menu getting lost behind the flash object. If you haven’t dealt with this before it can feel like a nightmare, but fortunately it’s a pretty easy fix.

The Problem: You have a CSS based drop-down menu in your navigation and a flash element near it the menus may get “hidden” behind the flash object.

The Solution: Set the z-index of the div holding the flash to 1 and the z-index of the div holding the nav to 2.

In the flash element:

Look for the flash <object> tag and add the following code:

<param name="wmode" value="transparent">

You’ll want to insert this code right below the <param name=”quality” value=”high”> tag and include the code wmode=”transparent” in the flash <embed> tag .

If you’ve already upgraded to WordPress 2.6, you might have noticed that WordPress handles images a little differently than the WordPress 2.5 branch and below.  The main change is that you can now use the alt field to add a caption, which will wrap a sort of caption below the image.

The problem I’ve had with this new setup is that it can cause some problems when trying to float your images due to the new class=”alignleft”, class=”alignright” or class=”aligncentered” elements.  The image will still move, but I’ve found the text won’t wrap properly around the image.

Thanks to a recent post from Sadish over at WP Lover, it looks like this problem can easily be fixed by by adding some code anywhere into your CSS stylesheet:

img.alignleft, div.alignleft {
float:left;
margin:0 0.5em 0.5em 0;
}
img.alignright, div.alignright {
float:right;
margin:0 0 0.5em 0.5em;
}
img.aligncenter, div.aligncenter {
text-align:center;
margin:0 auto;
}

This way the images should float and the text should wrap properly.  Thanks for posting the easy fix Sadish!

This sliding doors CSS hack allows you to create sophisticated tabs for your navigation bar. Sadly, Wordpress core functions wp_list_pages() and wp_list_categories() don’t allow you to add the required span tag to use this technique.

We are going to see how to proceed in order to use sliding doors in our Wordpress theme.

Sliding doors, why?

There’s many articles available on the web about the sliding doors technique, so I’m not going to talk a lot about it. For people who don’t already know this famous hack, here’s a quick example.

Let’s build a typical navigation list:

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="#">link n°1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">link n°2</a></li>
<li><a href="#">link n°3</a></li>
</ul>

If we apply, via CSS, background images to our links in order to make this menu prettier, we’ll quickly see a big problem: We must add a fixed width to the links, otherwise the image will be truncated if the link is too short, or the link will overflow the image if its width is too long.

That’s why sliding doors are very useful: We just have to add a span element inside the link, and then, in our CSS, assign a different background image to both the span element and the link.

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="#"><span>link n°1</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><span>link n°2</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#"><span>link n°3</span></a></li>
</ul>

Our CSS should look like this:

#nav a, #nav a:visited {
display:block;
}
#nav a:hover, #nav a:active {
background:url(images/tab-right.jpg) no-repeat 100% 1px;
float:left;
}
#nav a span {
float:left;
display:block;
}
#nav a:hover span {
float:left;
display:block;
background: url(images/tab-left.jpg) no-repeat 0 1px;
}

Please note, as this is only an example, the CSS above isn’t complete and only shows how to apply the sliding doors hack.

You can see a live demo of a navigation menu which uses this technique on my blog here.

Using the sliding doors hack within Wordpress

I saw many blog posts where some users told you to modify Wordpress core in order to apply this technique. Personally, I never really liked this idea: First, the Wordpress core wasn’t made for being modified. And secondly, if you do, when you’ll upgrade your WP version, you’ll have to re-modify the core. Not user friendly at all!

Instead of this, let’s use a regular expression, by using the php preg_replace() function. We are going to get our pages (or categories) without displaying it, and passing it as a parameter to preg_replace(). The two remaining parameters will be, of course, our regular expression: The pattern we’re looking for, and this pattern’s replacement.

To create this menu, paste the following code instead of the wp_list_pages() (or wp_list_categories()) function in the header.php of your Wordpress theme.

To list your pages:

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><span>Home</span></a></li>
<?php echo preg_replace('@\<li([^>]*)>\<a([^>]*)>(.*?)\<\/a>@i', '<li$1><a$2><span>$3</span></a>', wp_list_pages('echo=0&orderby=name&exlude=181&title_li=&depth=1')); ?>
</ul>

To list your categories:

<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/"><span>Home</span></a></li>
<?php echo preg_replace('@\<li([^>]*)>\<a([^>]*)>(.*?)\<\/a>@i', '<li$1><a$2><span>$3</span></a>', wp_list_categories('echo=0&orderby=name&exlude=181&title_li=&depth=1')); ?>
</ul>

Right now, your new menu is ready. You just have to make it sexy with CSS. Have fun!