Refine admin area CSS

Most of the admin CSS works fine, the only drawback seems to be that tables look extra-squished. In tinkering, simple changing the td rule in core.css seemed to make a big difference:

td {
        vertical-align: top;
        padding: 0px 5px;
}

Any thoughts on that?

Greetings! I'm just digging through a bit more and found a relatively serious but (i think?) easy to fix issue with the admin section. it appears that layout.css does a bunch of really agressive clearing and hiding on anything with the 'clear' class attached to it. I'm guessing this is to keep the layout consistent, but there are a large number of places around drupal that use the .clear class for keeping things aligned properly, and this seems to be hiding them. A good example is in the Views UI screen in Views 2: most of the elements in field and filter configuration forms hat are updated by AJAX have a .clear class on them, and they vanish when using Nitobe.

http://img.skitch.com/20080626-b6ygjqkauwpf1fgm6w4ffqwpqm.jpg has a quick screenshot of what the form looks like in garland -- in Nitobe, the highlighted section disappears entirely.

Some additional digging: It looks like the following chunk:

html body * span.clear, html body * div.clear, html body * li.clear,
html body * dd.clear {
    background: none;
    border: 0;
    clear: both;
    display: block;
    float: none;
    font-size: 0;
    height: 0;
    list-style: none;
    margin: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
    padding: 0;
    visibility: hidden;
    width: 0;
}

Might not be necessary. I commented it out and did a smoke test spin through the site, and everything continued to look A-OK, with the exception that previously hidden chunks of administrative forms appeared properly.

Okay, after even more tinkering around it looks like the commented-out bits are the problematic ones. With them gone, everything I can find displays properly:

html body * dd.clear {
    background: none;
    border: 0;
    clear: both;
    display: block;
    float: none;
    list-style: none;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
/*  overflow: hidden;
    font-size: 0;
    height: 0;
    visibility: hidden;
    width: 0; */
}

There still appear to be a handful of display issues in various administration screens -- I've attached one more patch that works well on the site I'm experimenting with (using Views UI, CCK, and a smorgasbord of third-party modules).

There are also two minor fixes in it: the 'author name' portion of each comment wasn't printing out correctly, and the phpemplate_page_class() function was being called with a $left parameter that never got populated.

Hope this is helpful!

These changes are now checked in.