Vertically extended content on right pane broken on member view page

I have noticed this bug also - came in to report it but jonathan has been on a message frenzy - lol

I'll look into this issue, though it's a difficult thing to reliably constrain external content. It has it's own styles applies to it. You can never reliably stop external content from breaking existing page layout. It can style itself on top of something else. It can even be invalid HTML.

There's definitely improvements that can be made, but, by definition, we can never stop content outside of our control from doing things that are out of our control.

Thanks for the reply Joe.
It really is no problem if the extended content pushes the frame of the whole page down. In fact you may want to consider allowing the columns to be independent, remove the bottom pane, and let the content do what it does. I know Kevin may not want this from a design perspective, but I dont see a problem with a design change to accommodate how members are using the system.

Also, 2 other things:
1) Make sure all of you get a chance to check out Netvibes and see what modules/widgets they are offering because CollectiveX members will be asking for the same stuff.
2) It would have been great if I could have been able to explicitly alert both Kevin and Rob on this post. That would be a good functionality. It would behave similar to a CC: in email.

Well, I've figure out at least one thing that we can do to limit these types of issues.

I'll have to re-layout our pages to no longer use an "absolute" positioning for the sidebar. This will allow it to push the footer down underneath it. However, if users enter content into the sidebar that contains an absolutely positioned element, there is nothing anybody can do, save God. :) That's one of the caveats of allowing user-editable sidebars.

@Joe:
Isnt html a pain-in-the-ass. Thanks for addressing this. There is a larger issue around the decision to re-layout pages, and that is of utilizing "real estate".

THE SIDEBAR: Access to putting content in the sidebar was an excellent use of space that had gone wasted. In fact, consider going a step further and allowing managers to elect to have different content in that sidebar for different tabs, or share sidebar content across specified tabs. Also, remember that unsophisticated users do not have to touch this stuff at all, and you could hide this functionality.

THE TOP NAV: This area is still not fully usable by managers and is space that could have had something more impactful.

THE FIXED WIDTH: 600x800 was the old standard. Considering the onset of wider and larger monitors and better cheaper video cards since 2000, 1024x768 is probably the minimum for the majority of people who use your platform. Even if its not, it would be a great use of space to allow us to elect whether to have a "stretchy" layout, and even allow us to determine to what extent it is stretchy (allowing us to determine margins: 100%, 90% etc).

BOTTOM LINE: Give is the ability to make this community what it needs to be for the people we are trying to serve, and lets maximize useful utilization of space.

You have no idea how tired of 800x600 I am. Clarence too. You should see how wide his screen is at the office!

Believe it or not, 6% of our users are still stuck with 800x600 (according to Google Analytics). That's mind-boggling to me. I really think that all of them just don't know they can make it 1024x768, or don't want to.

I would really love to completely redesign our layout. We just don't have the time to fit it into all of the other things we to do in the short term.

But I agree with you about it being the old standard. In fact, a couple months ago we had already decided to make it wider until we starting demoing it to corporate users who were 800x600, to our suprise. Just in case any of them are listening, I won't call them "dinosaurs". :)

This was actually fixed one or two months ago.

Let me know if you still see this problem...