I developed a page using the Basic theme on drupal 6.9 and when you go to the site for the first time in IE6 or IE7 or IE8 the content or more specific the text of the site loads first all on the right hand column, then the style sheets load to layout the copy correctly. I am also using Ubercart on the site. The style sheets are being loaded in the head of the page. Also I tried using a function in php that loads all the css files into one file by use of the import command. This didn't solve the issue or cause it because it does the same thing when using the default way of loading the css with Drupal (echo $styles). On the page.tpl i have moved the scripts that are loaded to the bottom of the page. I did this for performance reasons. Not sure if this is also the cause? Anyways if someone knows what might be the problem, please let me know. Also here is the url to test in IE6 or IE7 or IE8 to see exactly what I am talking about.

http://www.leakalertor.com

Chris

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

I would recommend to use the page caching, it is an automatic compression of the css files. Simply go to :

http://www.leakalertor.com/admin/settings/performance

There you can enable all sort of caching, including the css caching. I would recommend enabling all caching modes if the site is live.
I would also recommend not to worry too much, I tried loading the site on IE6 and 7 and only ie6 had 1 second or two of weirdness before being perfect, and that only happens once on the first load.

chrisa625’s picture

Thanks for your quick response. I tried optimizing the css and js and it didn't seem to work. Unfortunately when you have a slower connection the text could stay up on the screen for 5+ seconds depending on connection speed. Our client was complaining so just wanted to see if there was anything that might be causing it. I know switching to another theme like Garland makes it not do this so thats why I thought it might be something with the theme. Again thanks for your response and let me know if you can think of anything else.

Anonymous’s picture

Assigned: Unassigned »
Status: Active » Fixed

The only reason that would happen is that in Basic the content is loaded before the sidebars, for SEO reasons, thing that Garland does not do. But you can't expect the site to display properly if all the stylesheets aren't loaded yet. People with a low connection are just used to wait for proper rendering.

If you want to fix this, I guess you would have to review the layout method, to load the sidebar left first, so the content won't be squeezed during loading.

chrisa625’s picture

I will try your suggestion. To change the layout method do I change the basic.info file? In there i see and array called regions. Would i just have to change the order that it is listed in this file. Right now the order is:
regions[left] = Left sidebar
regions[right] = Right sidebar
regions[content_top] = Content Top
regions[content_bottom] = Content Bottom
regions[header] = Header
regions[footer_block] = Footer

Anonymous’s picture

No, to change the layout, you have to edit the layout.css and the page.tpl.php , it's like adeiting an html page and its css.

chrisa625’s picture

It worked. I moved the block of code to output the left region before the content region. I had to do a little bit of css work to get it to output correctly, specially for IE6. Thanks again for your help.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.