I’ve yet to find a WordPress theme that I really like, but out of those I’ve looked at Regulus by Binary Moon is my current choice. Even with this theme I’m not totally happy, so I’ve been making minor changes to it. I wanted the categories section in the sidebar to show the count of items in each category. I was told the default theme did that, so I loaded it up, worked out it was wp_list_cats() with various parameters and tweaked the Regulus layout to match. Unfortunately I broke it slightly… as you can see from the picture on the right.

I was a bit stumped as to what the problem was. There was nothing obvious in the HTML source, so I figured it must be the CSS. Oh joy, this could take a while! I was looking at messing about with it in TopStyle.

However, Vondur pointed me to this excellent Firefox plugin, the Web Developer Extension. I know every man and his dog who has the vaguest interest in web development has it already but I don’t see the point of adding another Firefox extension unless I really need it (Firefox uses enough memory as it is!).

And boy was it useful, I was able to edit the CSS and the changes appeared instantly, which made finding the problem easy. The culprit was “display:block;” in “#sidebar a”. Turning that off fixed it, but the links were too close together. So I tweaked “#sidebar li” with padding-top / padding-bottom values and that fixed it.

Having the right tools for the job makes it so much easier!