Making your existing Plone install look better in Internet Explorer 7

Note: This guide only applies to very specific versions of Plone (namely, Plone 2.1.3 and 2.5.1). Any later releases in the 2.1.x or 2.5.x series already have these fixes included.

Plone 2.1.3 and 2.5.1 included the majority of the fixes needed to work well with Internet Explorer 7, since we tested them with the earlier beta releases of IE7 — but a few additional changes need to be made to Plone to work well with what ended up being pushed out as the final release of IE7.

Visual problems

The following visual artifacts are present when you use Internet Explorer 7 on a Plone 2.1.3 or 2.5.1 site — depending on how you have customized it, that is:

Page is wider than the browser, causing horizontal scrolling

Solution: Put the following in your CSS: #portal-searchbox { overflow: hidden; }

Calendar has too much spacing between the table cells

Solution: Put the following in your CSS: .ploneCalendar { border-collapse: collapse }

If you are using Plone without icons in the navtree: Bullet markers appear

Solution: Put the following in your CSS: .navTreeLocal { list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none; }

That should be all of the visual issues. If there are any other problems that you see, please leave a comment here, and I'll update the document with any new additions.

Javascript problems

Internet Explorer has deprecated the implementation of the XmlHttpRequest object in MSXML 5.0, resulting in security warnings for things like LiveSearch and Kupu — but only if you have Office 2003 installed on the computer where you use Plone (or if you have installed MSXML 5.0 separately). Plone relies on an external library called Sarissa, which needs to be updated to check for the new native implementation of XmlHttpRequest in IE7. It's likely that we will ship a new release of Plone with these included during the coming days, but at the moment there is unfortunately no easy way to fix it yourself.

Update: The latest release of Kupu (1.3.9 as of this writing) should have fixed it, and the Sarissa people have also released a new version of their library.