Nice Menus FAQ

These are some common questions and issues that come up.

Ack! It's totally broken!
My menus get cut off (usually sidebar menus that pop sideways.)
My menus are going behind x element (e.g. a content div or the page text, etc.) in IE.
That didn't help, my menus are going behind my Flash.
Fix for IE where child items appear behind it's parent's sibling
Example: How floated sidebars in themes can support Nice Menus
Trouble with IE7 and Nice Menus

Ack! It's totally broken!
The menus may not work perfectly with all themes. Try Nice Menus out with the default Garland or Bluemarine first to check if it works there (it should) before filing a bug report or trying to write a patch for other themes.
My menus get cut off (usually sidebar menus that pop sideways.)
This will happen in contributed or custom themes that use overflow: hidden; to contain the sidebar contents. Nice Menus must be able to "overflow" over the content in order to expand properly. Some themes will break if you remove or override this condition. You will need to play with the CSS and determine if Nice Menus can be used with your theme. There is an issue where this is discussed. These are some themes known to have this issue:
- Barlow
- Sky
- Zen starterkit (Primary link dropdown will go behind content div)
My menus are going behind x element (e.g. a content div or the page text, etc.) in IE.
IE has some problems with z-indexes in CSS. Sometimes the way to fix that is to add position: relative; to a parent element but Nice Menus already does so. Therefore it shouldn't be a problem. You WILL have a problem sometimes, though, if other elements on your page use position: relative; as well. Basically if you have this problem, you need to review your CSS for the elements where the problem is happening and check to see if the position is set. Try removing it to see if that clears the problem. There is an issue in the queue that discusses this.
Possible work-arounds to consider:
- Fix for IE where child items appear behind its parent's sibling
- Example: How floated sidebars in themes can support Nice Menus
That didn't help, my menus are going behind my Flash.
This is an issue with Flash and there is nothing that Nice Menus can do to fix it. You can get the menus to appear over a Flash animation by adding the wmode="transparent" attribute in the EMBED tag, or <param name="wmode" value="transparent">. It seems that setting wmode to "opaque" also works. See #89472: slideshow modules overlap nice menus drop down (not just in IE) for more information.
Trouble with IE7 and Nice Menus
Check the DOCTYPE you're using in your custom template if you're having trouble with Nice Menus in IE7. If IE7 thinks it needs to go into a backwards-compatible "quirks mode" for web pages written to an older HTML standard, a workaround script meant to detect IE6 might not notice. That seems to be the case with 6.x-1.3 where the child menu simply was not coming out at all in IE7 while it worked in Safari and Firefox.
Here's the old DOCTYPE, often used out of habit:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
Switching to this one solve the problem:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

For reference:
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/
Trouble with IE8, nice menus and CUFON font replacement. When IE renders the page and CUFON triggers the text dissapears.
You can fix this by changing from using visible to display in css,
The code for that is here: http://drupal.org/node/834636#comment-3153714
For IE8, you may have to use this code: http://drupal.org/node/834636#comment-3203742