(Solved) Minor Sidebar Template Issue - Any help is appreciated.

[afrikarulz]

Hi. I'm running CMS Made Simple 1.07. I'm using PHP 4.3.9, and MySQL 4.1.20. This is all working with Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS).

I am only having a small issue with my template.  First of all, I am using, the Top Simple Navigation Layout and I am having two problems.  They can both be seen at the following address:

http://www.riftvalleyacademy.org/cms/index.php?page=sitemap

First Problem:  The sidebar only goes down as far as I have content in it.  I need it to go all the way to meet the footer regardless of how much content is in the area on the right.

Second Problem:  When you roll over the links in the vertical sidebar on the left, there is no padding on the rollover on the right hand side like there is on the left hand side.

I know they are probably really easy to fix, but I can't seem to figure it out.  Any help would be greatly appreciated and I can post anything that you might need if I need to.

Thanks.

[Nullig]

What you need to do is to have a background image for the "content" div, that has your sidebar color on the left-hand side and white on the right-hand side and repeat it on the y axis. This will fill the left-hand side of the whole content area with the appropriate colors, even when the main div is longer than the sidebar. Of course, you will need to have a fixed width for the sidebar, which matches the width of the beige portion of the background image.

Nullig

Something like this:

[afrikarulz]

Thanks for the advice and I will look into it, but is using an image the only way that this is possible?

This website will be used in Africa eventually, and I need for it to be as fast as possible.  I'm just afraid that adding an image to load in the background on each page will slow everything way down.  Since a lot of Internet connections in Africa are still on dial-up, I don't want everything to take forever to load. 

Any other thoughts or suggestions on how I can speed the website up would be greatly appreciated.  Is there a cache plugin or module for CMSMS similar to the WP-Cache plugin for Wordpress?  I know that there is the link when you create a page in the advanced section that you can check, but I didn't know if there was any other ways to make everything faster.

Thanks Again everyone and keep up the good work.

[Nullig]

It's a very small image, which would be cached by the browser, anyway, so it shouldn't make much of a difference.

As far as I know, that's the only way it will look like you want it to.

Nullig

[afrikarulz]

Thanks a ton.  I got it figured out.  I took the example you gave.  Modified it a bit, so that it was just the sidebar color and then set the sidebar to a static size, not a percentage and I can't tell a difference in the page load times. 

Again thank you Nullig, and thanks to all the developers of this wonderful CMS.  Keep up the good work.