Clearing Floats With WordPress

Using a “float” in a web design is fairly common these days; it is used to float images for wrapping text, as well as being one of the easier, standard-compliant methods to achieve columns. For example, if you want to have a content column, with a sidebar column floating to the right, you would probably have something similar to this (example after the jump):

HTML

<div id="container">
  <div id="content">
    Some content
  </div>
  <div id="sidebar">
    Some navigation
  </div>
</div>

CSS

#container {
  margin: 0 auto;
  width: 960px;
}

#content {
  width: 615px;
  margin-right: 15px;
  float: left;
}

#sidebar {
  width: 330px;
  float: left;
}

However, there is a common problem with using floats across almost any browser: if the containing <div> tag does not have an element inside with a clear: both; attribute set, <div>s later in the page will run into that container. To avoid this, you create a special “clearing” <div>.

HTML

<div class="clearboth">&nbsp;</div>

CSS

.clearboth {
  height: 0;
  clear: both;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

Just insert the <div> at the bottom of the container, just before its closing tag (line 8):

HTML

<div id="container">
  <div id="content">
    Some content
  </div>
  <div id="sidebar">
    Some navigation
  </div>
  <div class="clearboth">&nbsp;</div>
</div>

This works perfectly, as the surrounding container <div> properly encapsulates the two children <div>s.

There is still one problem, though. That can be a lot to type, and often hard to remember (I can never remember whether I use a “clear” class or “clearboth”). To avoid this problem, I created a WordPress function that I can use in any template. To use it, insert the following code at the bottom of your functions.php file in your theme:

PHP

<?php function clearboth() { ?>
<div class="clearboth"> </div>
<?php } ?>

After that, just insert the following tag into your templates whenever you need to clear a div:

HTML

<div id="container">
  <div id="content">
    Some content
  </div>
  <div id="sidebar">
    Some navigation
  </div>
  <?php clearboth(); ?>
</div>

It’s a little less to type, but it also keeps you consistent in the formatting of your clear . If you wanted to, you could even make the function name shorter, e.g. cb.