"Pin Footer" Now Available

mbonocore

Hey guys,

Small feature, but I know alot of people have asked me about it. You can now pin the footer of your SmugMug site. Let me know if you have any questions.

Jtring

mbonocore wrote: »

Hey guys, Small feature, but I know alot of people have asked me about it. You can now pin the footer of your SmugMug site. Let me know if you have any questions.

For me at least, this latest push seems to have messed up the pinning of left side bars on pages that are large enough to require lots of scrolling. The left sidebar jumps to the bottom of the page, which may be a long way down. To see what I'm talking about take a look at

http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Sierra-Nevada/Little-Yosemite-Valley/

Start scrolling down and then go try to find where the sidebar went. I've opened a discussion directly with the Heros for my site's issues. They've replicated it and have sent it over to development. My situation may be a little unusual because I've inserted the sidebars at the page, template, custom folder, and custom gallery level, rather than at the entire site level. That lets me have context-sensitive sidebars, but may not have been a use case that this push planned for.

--> I suggest others who have pinned elements check their site to see if everything is OK.

Jim Ringland
jtring.smugmug.com

leftquark

Jtring wrote: »

For me at least, this latest push seems to have messed up the pinning of left side bars on pages that are large enough to require lots of scrolling.

--> I suggest others who have pinned elements check their site to see if everything is OK.

I noticed problems when I was at work on a Windows 7 machine running Chrome. On my Mac running Chrome it seems to work fine. Here's the gallery I had in question: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Events/Weddings/SimkinsWalline/n-3T9Fx

brandofamily

Jtring wrote: »

For me at least, this latest push seems to have messed up the pinning of left side bars on pages that are large enough to require lots of scrolling. The left sidebar jumps to the bottom of the page, which may be a long way down. To see what I'm talking about take a look at

http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Sierra-Nevada/Little-Yosemite-Valley/

Start scrolling down and then go try to find where the sidebar went. I've opened a discussion directly with the Heros for my site's issues. They've replicated it and have sent it over to development. My situation may be a little unusual because I've inserted the sidebars at the page, template, custom folder, and custom gallery level, rather than at the entire site level. That lets me have context-sensitive sidebars, but may not have been a use case that this push planned for.

--> I suggest others who have pinned elements check their site to see if everything is OK.

Jim Ringland
jtring.smugmug.com

I'm getting the same weirdness here:
http://www.onbroadwaydancers.com/Picture-Galleries/On-Broadway-Dancers
and the side bar is set for the entire site. But mine is jumping down then back up.

dennismullen

You are on to the right idea, but what is needed is the ability to pin the header "AND" the footer.
once this is done you need to fix the Slideshow auto height doesn't consider footer bug.

Then I could finally have a home page that fills the screen by adjusting the size of the slideshow to fit between the header and the footer.

Cheers,

kimbomac

My footer has a grey background, but this only kicks in if you scroll to the bottom of the page. If not at the bottom of the page, the grey background disappears, and the text overlays the rest of the page content.

I'm going to undo the pinning for now, because it looks terrible that way.

Jtring

leftquark wrote: »

I noticed problems when I was at work on a Windows 7 machine running Chrome. On my Mac running Chrome it seems to work fine. Here's the gallery I had in question: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Events/Weddings/SimkinsWalline/n-3T9Fx

On Win 7/FF, the sidebar pinning on both your site and the one brandofamily linked look fine to me. I wonder what's going on with mine. Actually, I know: a look at the HTML and CSS shows that different class structure is being invoked when I scroll. But why? That's the Heroic question.

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

SmugSam

Jtring wrote: »

Start scrolling down and then go try to find where the sidebar went. I've opened a discussion directly with the Heros for my site's issues. They've replicated it and have sent it over to development. My situation may be a little unusual because I've inserted the sidebars at the page, template, custom folder, and custom gallery level, rather than at the entire site level. That lets me have context-sensitive sidebars, but may not have been a use case that this push planned for.

--> I suggest others who have pinned elements check their site to see if everything is OK.

Jim Ringland
jtring.smugmug.com

I have noticed the same behaviour on my site, also. The side bar used to scroll with the page, and now it just disappears to the very bottom (tried on both Safari/Chrome). Example here: http://smcdowell.smugmug.com/Collection/

Jim, have you had any response? Is there an open bug for this that I should add my example to for the SM team? Or maybe I should raise my own?

Sam

SmugSam

SmugSam wrote: »

I have noticed the same behaviour on my site, also. The side bar used to scroll with the page, and now it just disappears to the very bottom (tried on both Safari/Chrome). Example here: http://smcdowell.smugmug.com/Collection/

Jim, have you had any response? Is there an open bug for this that I should add my example to for the SM team? Or maybe I should raise my own?

Sam

I raised the issue with SM Heroes. They told me it was an issue with my custom CSS. However I haven't changed my CSS (not that there is much that I have there) and everything was working fine on my site last time I looked. Anyone else had any progress with this?

Sam

Jtring

SmugSam wrote: »

I have noticed the same behaviour on my site, also. The side bar used to scroll with the page, and now it just disappears to the very bottom (tried on both Safari/Chrome). Example here: http://smcdowell.smugmug.com/Collection/

Jim, have you had any response? Is there an open bug for this that I should add my example to for the SM team? Or maybe I should raise my own?

Sam

I've had a small amount of interchange with the Heros. They've acknowledged it's a piece of their CSS code. I'm personally not sure if it's the CSS or whatever Smugmug uses to generate the HTML that links it. In any case, it's not my custom code.

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

SmugSam

SmugSam wrote: »

I raised the issue with SM Heroes. They told me it was an issue with my custom CSS. However I haven't changed my CSS (not that there is much that I have there) and everything was working fine on my site last time I looked. Anyone else had any progress with this?

Sam

OK so it turns out it DOES appear to be an issue within my CSS. At the Heroes' suggestion I cut my CSS out and tried again and it worked as normal. Strange, because it used to be working OK. Looks like I have to go through step by step and figure out where the problem is...

Sam

Jtring

SmugSam wrote: »

OK so it turns out it DOES appear to be an issue within my CSS. At the Heroes' suggestion I cut my CSS out and tried again and it worked as normal. Strange, because it used to be working OK. Looks like I have to go through step by step and figure out where the problem is...

Sam

Hi Sam,

Let us all know what you find.

Following your experience, I tried removing my custom CSS. No change on the galleries but the jumping behavior did stop on one of the pages where it occurred ... but not on others! When I reloaded the CSS, that one page remained "healed". It's pretty strange. The sidebar on this page is now simply unpinned:

http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Tools

while these still show the jumping sidebar:

http://jtringl.smugmug.com/CSS
http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Sierra-Nevada/Little-Yosemite-Valley/ (one example among many galleries)

By setting pinning to "Left" at the Entire Site level, I can have a sidebar that scrolls with the rest of the content ("unpinned") -- yes, that seems backwards -- but I have no way to produce a sidebar that is fixed ("pinned") without jumping. While both I and the Heros can see the SmugMug code causing the jumping, I'm still awaiting updates and resolution. I've also passed this status update onto them directly.

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

SmugSam

Hi Jim,

I have done some testing and narrowed down the "offending" piece of code. I removed all my CSS and re-added it section by section. The issue I am having seems to be sparked by a line that simply hides the footer on larger displays:

@media only screen and (min-width: 640px) { 
  .sm-page-layout-region-footer { display: none; } 
}

I use a footer for smaller displays to get around unwanted 'stacking' of all menu blocks once a small screen is detected (i.e. the footer is displayed on smaller screens, but hidden from larger ones). But I have NO idea why this would cause my issue. And I can confirm that it wasn't having this problem a week or so ago. And the fact that it is targeting the footer may tie in with the assumption that this is somehow related to the "Pin Footer" functionality.

Do you do anything of this nature with your site?

I will send this info to the Hero(e)s and reference your case number. I have asked to have my issue linked to your case number, as I am fairly sure it is the same - but I am not sure if that has been taken up.

One question for you:

Jtring wrote: »

By setting pinning to "Left" at the Entire Site level, I can have a sidebar that scrolls with the rest of the content ("unpinned") -- yes, that seems backwards -- but I have no way to produce a sidebar that is fixed ("pinned") without jumping.

I may be confused by what you are saying, but the behaviour you describe above is in line with my understanding of how it would work, not backwards? I have the left section 'pinned' at Entire Site level, so that the sidebar content follows downwards as I scroll down on longer pages. Isn't that the way it is supposed to be?

Sam

SmugSam

(Also should note something I came across which added to my confusion - setting the "Pinning" function at "Entire Site" level from some pages, like a gallery, doesn't seem to actually work. It doesn't follow the setting I just made even though it says you have set it to x, but if I go to my Home Page and look, it says it is set to y.)

Jtring

SmugSam wrote: »

... the behaviour you describe above is in line with my understanding of how it would work, not backwards? I have the left section 'pinned' at Entire Site level, so that the sidebar content follows downwards as I scroll down on longer pages. Isn't that the way it is supposed to be?
Sam

The SmugMug documentation at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1222436-can-i-change-the-layout-of-my-smugmug-site- says

Pinning: Pin your Header or Side Bar so it doesn't move as the viewer scrolls up or down the page.

What I see with pinning set to "Left" is that the sidebar does move along with the content as I scroll, which not consistent with definition above. This happens on all pages. With pinning set to "None", on most pages I get the jump to the bottom. The sidebar is pinned and in the wrong place: doubly inconsistent. It's almost as if Smugmug thinks my sidebar is a footer (Example). The odd man out is my Tools Page, where "None" gives me the move-along-with-the-content scrolling behavior. That IS consistent with the definitions. Not what I want, but consistent. What I can't get is well-behaved pinning in accordance with the definition I quoted above. And I had that a week ago.

As for the Smugmug footer, I have it turned off, but I haven't hidden the Powered By message. My CSS does move it around and shrink it. Still, turning the SM footer on or off, removing and restoring my move-and-shrink CSS code, or even totally hiding and restoring the Powered By message makes no difference on my pinning issue.

I've not heard back from SmugMug on this since my last post, but it's only been about a day.

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

SmugSam

Jtring wrote: »

The SmugMug documentation at http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/1222436-can-i-change-the-layout-of-my-smugmug-site- says

Pinning: Pin your Header or Side Bar so it doesn't move as the viewer scrolls up or down the page.

What I see with pinning set to "Left" is that the sidebar does move along with the content as I scroll, which not consistent with definition above. This happens on all pages. With pinning set to "None", on most pages I get the jump to the bottom. The sidebar is pinned and in the wrong place: doubly inconsistent. It's almost as if Smugmug thinks my sidebar is a footer

Well if what you are saying, Jim, is that whichever section you 'pin' will stay fixed relative to your browser window, and not relative to the page content, then yes that is how I understand it to work. And how it HAS worked for me up until now.

The weird thing is - the behaviour you describe on your site is EXACTLY the opposite to what I am having - if I have Pinning set to Left (as I always have) my left hand sidebar used to stay fixed (relative to the browser window, NOT the web page). So, for example, when I navigate to a scrollable page, my left hand menus etc would stay on screen and 'follow' me as I scrolled down - exactly what I wanted. NOW when a scrollable page loads the sidebar jumps to the bottom of the page. If, however, I change "Pinned" to 'None', then the sidebar content behaves as one with the rest of the page - i.e. if I scroll down it will flow upwards and off the page with the rest of the content at the top. This is the correct behaviour I would expect for no pinning. But sounds like your experience with these two settings is reversed?

Sam

Jtring

SmugSam wrote: »

... if I have Pinning set to Left (as I always have) my left hand sidebar used to stay fixed (relative to the browser window, NOT the web page). So, for example, when I navigate to a scrollable page, my left hand menus etc would stay on screen and 'follow' me as I scrolled down - exactly what I wanted.

NOW when a scrollable page loads the sidebar jumps to the bottom of the page.

... If, however, I change "Pinned" to 'None', then the sidebar content behaves as one with the rest of the page - i.e. if I scroll down it will flow upwards and off the page with the rest of the content at the top. This is the correct behavior I would expect for no pinning. But sounds like your experience with these two settings is reversed?
Sam

Indeed. Before Friday pinning worked for me exactly as it did for you and exactly as described in the doc. Since Friday we are seeing opposite behavior!

Did you create the sidebars at the individual page or folder/gallery template level? Or did you create them at the Entire Site level? Mine correspond to the former. If you built one master sidebar at the Entire Site level, that's a difference between our sites that may have something to do with the differential behavior.

Still, since we seem to be the only people seeing this, it looks more and more like this is a pair of individual caching or site corruption problems, not a global Smugmug design issue. (Not my local cache: I've flushed it this side several times without effect.)

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

SmugSam

I have a single sidebar created at the Entire Site level.

Tomorrow I should have time to try and create a page with its own sidebar and see what it does. I have cleared caches also and am still seeing the behaviour, across both Safari and Chrome.

Sam

SmugSam

Have you heard anything further, Jim?

I tested a sidebar on its own page, but didn't have the same behaviour you experienced. Still just my 'Entire Site' side bar acting weird. Having said that - I realised when playing that you can't 'pin' page-specific sections, can you? Isn't this only available for 'Entire Site' sections?

One query I never cleared up with you - do you have any CSS code affecting the footer? As per an earlier post in this thread, I have some code that hides the footer on larger displays, and if I remove this code my sidebar issue goes away, wondering if there is a common link there with your issues?

Jtring

Hi Sam.

I had page-specific (and folder-template-specific, and gallery-template-specific) sidebars pinned two weeks ago. With the update, that died. I never had an Entire Site sidebar. As for the footer, I've turned it off from the Settings menus. The "Powered By" message remains. For that, I have a little CSS to adjust size and position. It's unobtrusive, but it's not totally hidden. Adding or removing that CSS doesn't change the sidebar behavior. I've exchanged a few notes on all of this with the Heros but nothing has worked.

So I've gone ahead and just written a snippet of my own CSS that pins the sidebar in all reasonable cases. That local patch gets me 100% back to where I was two weeks ago, but it's still sitting on top of the SmugMug HTML and associated CSS that would otherwise produce errant results.

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

SmugSam

Thanks Jim. I think I have resigned myself to trying to come up with another solution to work around this also.

One question - I am still a bit confused as to what you mean by:

Jtring wrote: »

I had page-specific (and folder-template-specific, and gallery-template-specific) sidebars pinned two weeks ago.

I can't see an option to 'pin' site sections, other than at the Entire Site Level? e.g. I can't see how you do that for 'All Folders' or 'All Galleries'? Or am I misunderstanding you? Not a biggie now we are choosing to solve this issue ourselves - just a query about the site functionality that I think I may be mixing up.

Sam

Jtring

I think a pinning option used to exist for individual pages. (Does anybody else reading this forum remember?) My old notes suggest that. It's either that or the Entire Site pinning flowed down to page-specific and template-specific sidebars. In any case, they were pinned before update.

Jim Ringland
jtringl.smugmug.com

SmugSam

Thanks Jim. The weird thing is - part of my plan to work around this 'issue' was to move to page-specific sidebars, and abandon the Entire Site sidebar that was now acting strange. But how on earth do you pin the sidebar when each page has a different one? I can't figure out how to do that? Seems to be either a pinnable (is that a word?) Entire Site sidebar, or page-specific sidebars that can't be pinned. Any ideas?

It feels I am working against the intended design flow rather than with it....

(Also have just managed to entirely wipe out my site navigation in testing the above...)

mbonocore

Jtring wrote: »

For me at least, this latest push seems to have messed up the pinning of left side bars on pages that are large enough to require lots of scrolling. The left sidebar jumps to the bottom of the page, which may be a long way down. To see what I'm talking about take a look at

http://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Sierra-Nevada/Little-Yosemite-Valley/

Start scrolling down and then go try to find where the sidebar went. I've opened a discussion directly with the Heros for my site's issues. They've replicated it and have sent it over to development. My situation may be a little unusual because I've inserted the sidebars at the page, template, custom folder, and custom gallery level, rather than at the entire site level. That lets me have context-sensitive sidebars, but may not have been a use case that this push planned for.

--> I suggest others who have pinned elements check their site to see if everything is OK.

Jim Ringland
jtring.smugmug.com

Jim I still haven't been able to recreate this on your site. Can you let me know what size monitor you are viewing on?

Jtring

mbonocore wrote: »

Jim I still haven't been able to recreate this on your site. Can you let me know what size monitor you are viewing on?

Hi Michael,

1920 x 1200, but that's probably not the issue.

After a fair amount of discussion with the Heros -- mostly Eric Trimble, who was able to reproduce the issue on my site -- I wrote up some lengthy diagnostic information and then put up a patch via my site CSS that forces the sidebar to be pinned properly. You won't see anything if you just go in now. You probably can see the patch at work if you poke at my site with a code inspector. That approach seemed reasonable given the issue does not seem widespread.

I'll not repeat all the diagnostic information here unless you are interested. However since the patch may at some point be of interest to the others, I've copied it below. It's pretty simple. It's specific to my site sizing and layout.

@Media (min-width:650px) { 
    .sm-user-ui  .sm-page-layout-sitetemplate  .sm-page-layout > .sm-page-layout-region > .sm-page-layout-region-left {
        position:fixed;
        top:auto;
        bottom:auto; 
        left:24px !important; 
    } 
}

The @Media is there because below about 650 px screen width, the sidebar gets moved to the top, in which case this isn't appropriate. The very long class declaration is needed to override a problematic piece of SM CSS, although I suspect the real issue is with the line of SM HTML that invokes it, not the CSS itself. The !important is needed because in one place SM uses an HTML in-line style rather than CSS to do the formatting.

Jtring

I just did a code inspection: the odd SM HTML causing me problems seems to be gone. However, one residual issue from the Pin Footer change remains. As far as I can tell, there is no way to pin a sidebar created at the gallery, folder, or page level. That option does not appear on the layout tab for these. Setting pinning to "Left" at the Entire Site level does not pin my more local left sidebars. The CSS patch to do so is, however, even simpler than before:

@Media (min-width:650px) {
.sm-user-ui .sm-page-layout-sitetemplate
.sm-page-layout > .sm-page-layout-region >
.sm-page-layout-region-left {
position:fixed;
}
}

So the only open issue I have now is that it would be nice (but not critical) to have a native way to pin sidebars installed at the folder, page, or gallery levels.

mbonocore

Jtring wrote: »

I just did a code inspection: the odd SM HTML causing me problems seems to be gone. However, one residual issue from the Pin Footer change remains. As far as I can tell, there is no way to pin a sidebar created at the gallery, folder, or page level. That option does not appear on the layout tab for these. Setting pinning to "Left" at the Entire Site level does not pin my more local left sidebars. The CSS patch to do so is, however, even simpler than before:

@Media (min-width:650px) {
.sm-user-ui .sm-page-layout-sitetemplate
.sm-page-layout > .sm-page-layout-region >
.sm-page-layout-region-left {
position:fixed;
}
}

So the only open issue I have now is that it would be nice (but not critical) to have a native way to pin sidebars installed at the folder, page, or gallery levels.

Yeah, I have been in situations where I have needed to pin the a side bar or header on a page only. This CSS is helpful, but I will put in a feature request!

Jtring

mbonocore wrote: »

Yeah, I have been in situations where I have needed to pin the a side bar or header on a page only. This CSS is helpful, but I will put in a feature request!

Thank you, Michael. I'll repeat, though, that for me this is a nice-to-have, not a critical-to-have. Number 1 on my wish list remains the ability to edit the selection in a f/g/p content block.