BuddyPress.org

@pcwriter you don’t provide anything for anyone to look at

However whenever anyone states that something works on one page but not another that generally means that there is somewhere what should be fairly obvious differences in markup or CSS between the two.

I’m afraid to say that the layout does not hold together in Opera either and this is a ‘Modern’ generation browser that supports Standrds and CSS very well.

Validating markup is key to many layout issues and even mod1 eyeballs.

<php
/*
Template Name: Custom Front Page
*/
?>
At the top of your index page is causing sgml parsers to void the DTD declaration you need to correct this error initially then look at how the layout stacks up, at the moment you are forcing browsers into ‘Quirks Mode’ each and every browsers will give you a different take on what it thinks is the correct rendering of the page.

There are other markup issues which you will need to address such as illegal nesting of elements; an anchor element may not contain Block level elements such as divs, and there is no proscribed manner in which browsers are meant to correct malformed markup, they make a best guess stab at things and clearly IE8 is struggling with that although it will suffer more than other browsers from being forced to render in quirks mode, it’s only a half decent browser when allowed to render in ‘Standards Mode’.

One last thing and please don’t take offense but that roaming toolbar thing is extremely irritating and if a client asked me to implement something like that I would simply and flatly refuse

Add the html validator plugin for Firefox that will give you real time sgml validation that matches the W3C validator but offline has you develop

Great stuff, the validator will help to identify problems, but don’t get frustrated trying to correct all errors or warnings it may report; to some extent due to the nature of third party plugins and WP you will find errors introduced that simply prove too awkward to fix without going into the core plugin files to fix things, mostly these will be minor errors that browsers will attempt to correct. There are a few bad ones I’ve seen recently though such as style tags being incorrectly added into the document ‘body’ element when the tag can only ever exists in the ‘head’ at least though you will be warned of the issue and can choose to track down and correct or live with if not causing total layout failure.