I know the "My template changes aren't showing up!" topic comes up a lot, and I've read through a ton of past messages about it and tried everything recommended there, but to no avail.

The situation: changes I make to the style.css for my custom theme sometimes show up right away, and sometimes (like now, for example), will not show up no matter what I do.

What I have done:

- Read the FAQ page on this and tried everything it said to.

- Made sure my custom theme exists in its own directory, as opposed to changing the default one

- Made sure "Update template files..." was set to Yes in general preferences

- Made sure caching was turned off for everything I had the option of turning it off for

- Emptied the template_c directory

- Cleared my browser cache multiple times, quit my browser and restarted it, and in fact tried multiple browsers

- Re-uploaded the changed file, several times

- Edited the file directly on the server with a remote text editor

- Update the AMS module even though I don't think this is an AMS specific problem - it's a theme issue.

What Resulted From All This:

Bugger all, pretty much. The change I was trying to make (removing the class ".itemText:first-letter {font-size: 133%; font-weight: bold;} so that I don't get that horrible initial cap at the beginning of stories) just does. not. happen.

If I open the stylesheet on the server in the text editor, that line is not there. But if I view source in my browser - ANY browser - then it is. And I need it gone.

Does anyone have any ideas what I could try apart from everything I've already done? Right now the client I'm developing this site for thinks I'm a total slacker and just not making the changes she's asking for, and I'm having a hard time convincing her that I really am making changes and they're just not showing up.

And the screwy thing is, many of my past changes have shown up, as you'll see if you look at this sample page - my custom theme is already a lot different than the default. But every now and then I try to implement a change and it just won't work.

Any ideas? Please?

Is it on line? So I can see the code.

Yes, I put a link to a sample page in the above post. Here it is again: http://juice.spidersilk.net/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=20

The theme I made is called juice, and the stylesheet is here:
http://juice.spidersilk.net/themes/juice/style.css

The only changes I have made (this time) are to that stylesheet, and my changes (removal of the first-line class and the line-spacing rule in the itemText class) are showing up when I view the stylesheet on the server with a text editor, but not when I view it in the browser.

I am using firefox and the first letter is displayed as normal.

Are we using the same definition of "normal" here? :)

What I'm seeing - and I just checked it on another computer entirely, so I know it's not just my system - is that the initial T at the beginning of the story (at the start of "The Sixteenth Annual SOCAN Awards...") is larger than the rest of the text, and bold. And the whole first paragraph has slightly larger line spacing than the rest of the article.

I know both those things are Xoops-standard, but that's what I'm trying to change. I don't want that initial bold cap, and I want the line spacing to be normal. I made both those changes in the stylesheet, but they're not showing up.

Is that what you're seeing - the bold cap and wider line spacing - but you're describing them as normal because that's how XOOPS normally formats things? Or are you not seeing the first letter as bold?

Because I've seen the bold cap still there in three different browsers on my own computer, plus one on my partner's, so I don't think it's just a browser caching issue...

My Bad it is different.

.itemText {margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; line-height: 1.5em;;}
.itemText:first-letter {font-size: 133%; font-weight: bold;}

Change the values in blue.

I already did. Those are the changes that are not showing up. That was the whole point of my post.

I changed those things, and when the changes failed to show up, I did everything else I listed (cleared browser cache, emptied templates_c, etc.) and nothing will make my changes show up.

When I look at the stylesheet on the server with a text editor, the changes do show there as having been made, but they do not show up in any browser, and if I view the stylesheet in any browser, the old version, without the changes, is what I see. So presumably XOOPS is somehow caching it somewhere, but I can't figure out where. It's not in the templates_c because I've emptied that a bunch of times. And "Update module template .html files from themes/your theme/templates directory?" is set to Yes, so it should be getting the newer file, but it's not.

I believe your difficulty may be in that the AMS for the AMS specific like Topics is not drawing from your Theme style.css but from a file within the AMS module directory. Check in there....
I wish I could help more than that but I have run out of time for now.

Hope this helps!

Quest

I just checked the AMS directory and it doesn't appear to contain any style sheets, just HTML files.

And when I go to the stylesheet directly in my browser, at http://juice.spidersilk.net/themes/juice/style.css , it is not showing my changes, though it does when I look at the file on the server with a text editor.

So it looks like it is the theme stylesheet where the problem is occurring.

Oh, man - I think I've figured out what my problem was - with this and with the image manager problems I posted about elsewhere on the forum - and now I feel like a complete idiot.

Just before going away for the holidays, in response to something my client had said which it turned out I'd misunderstood, I had thought she wanted FTP access to the site and had set her up with her own FTP ID on my account and moved the site into that ID's home directory, then done a quick check to make sure everything looked OK before leaving.

Guess what I had completely forgotten by the time I came back and started working on it again?

Yes. I was uploading everything to the wrong copy of the site, back in my own home directory.

It does seem like some parts of XOOPS were still looking at the old directory while some were looking at the new one, so I'm guessing that somewhere in a config file or something the server path to its original location is specified, but for now I've moved it back to its original home since that seemed easiest.

And I am now going to crawl under my desk and attempt to forget any of this ever happened. My apologies for wasting everyone's time.


Lynna