Since I had to start over I installed one of my favorite WordPress plugins: Now Reading. The layout was messed up when you went to the full library for any theme I used other than the default. I had this problem even before I started over, but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it back then. The sidebar would be in the correct column, but pushed down and start where the library content ended.  I went through the code much more closely this time and finally figured it out.

Looking through the library template file I noticed two things. The first thing I noticed was the

<?php get_sidebar() ?>

at the end of the file. Delete that line and the sidebar will go back to the top. After that the sidebar background was seen in the content area. To get rid of this I had to look through one of the theme template pages to see what the differences were. After comparing the two I noticed that the Now Reading template had at the top

<div class="content">

	<div id="content" class="now-reading primary narrowcolumn">

Delete those two divs and the corresponding end tags and you should be good to go.

I also removed the bullets in some of the lists to make it look better and changed the author templates to show the books as a multi column list with just the book cover images.

Update: The newest automatic update seems to have broken the layout again. I’m too lazy to fix it though. 🙁

Update #2: I must have been really lazy because the fix is in this post. After many months I checked this post again and fixed up the templates to work properly. I also took out the bullets in the unordered lists because they weren’t indented properly, but it might look a little cluttered now.