I am attempting once again to use the GetShopped! gold cart for a shopping cart. This one is relatively simple because there are only two product types; cds and mp3 downloads. Simple. Right.

I just spent hours tracking down why the grid view wouldn’t align the images correctly in the second row. I finally noticed that there were p tags appearing for no good reason at all.

The reason is the theme that was installed to run the site – Striking. It does everything for you, maybe even wipe your butt and mop the floor. But it also inserts space so every time you have an image, it makes sure it gets blank spaces after it. It also makes it easier for authors; they hit the carriage return and wordpress automatically puts in the tags for you. How convenient.

The shopping cart is made up of product images, and after the divs were wrapped up and ready to move onto the next thing, some pesky p tags were hanging out, the width of the parent div, above the next image in the same row and the next column, forcing that next element in the next column down about 25px.

Thanks to a response on the gold cart forum about themes doing this dastardly thing, I found the solution: raw tags.

[raw] [shortcode] [/raw] and all the alignment issues magically disappeared! I am so happy now. If only I could bill for the time I spend being stubborn about tracking this kind of stuff down.