wheresrhys

Further to my post about the usefulness of position:fixed, in particular with regard to the .submitbox in the wordpress admin interface, I’ve continued to refine it all.

I came across Eric Meyer’s MW Adminize WordPress plugin (via the latest Sitepoint list of useful CSS links). Essentially what it does is compress the navigation and header of the admin screens into a smaller area by including an extra stylesheet.

“Hang on, ” think I. “Now that looks pretty much like a toolbar – why not use position:fixed on it”. Which is what I’ve done, and the effect is most satisfactory. There’s was a bit of ironing out to do as various page elements (which presumably have position: relative/absolute) overlaid it, but z-index:2000; soon sorted that out.

At present I’ve had to edit not just Eric Meyer’s CSS file, but also a couple of the php pages in order to insert a div with id=”toolbar”, but in a future iteration I will painstakingly go through each page element that needs position fixed and then remove the containing div, thus making it a candidate to be a branch of the original plug-in.

Watch this space.

I always found it annoying when websites got an element (normally an advert) to stay on the screen even when you scrolled up and down athe page. But recently, with the advent of web applications, position:fixed could start to be more commonly used. Facebook’s messaging/notifications bar is the best (and only, if I’m honest) example I can think of; it’s discreet and contains features that it’s quite resaonable to expect you will always want to have to hand.

Along similar lines, I’ve edited my worpress template. Adding .submitbox{position:fixed;top:100px;} to your wp-admin.css means you never have to scroll around to publish a post.