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Your site looks broken after a CSS change

You changed your custom CSS, and now your public site looks wrong — text overlapping, a menu missing, or styling gone astray.

What’s happening

Section titled “What’s happening”

A custom CSS rule you added is changing the page in a way you didn’t intend. Custom CSS layers on top of your theme, so one bad rule can hide or shift things on your public site and member portal.

Here’s the reassuring part. Your theme is still doing its job underneath, and custom CSS never touches your admin area — so you can always get back in to fix it. MapleGather also gives you a safe-mode view that shows your site with custom CSS turned off. That lets you see the real layout while you track down the rule.

How to fix it

Section titled “How to fix it”
  1. Sign in to MapleGather as an admin in the same browser.
  2. Open your public site and add /safe-mode to the end of your site address — for example, riverside.maplegather.org/safe-mode.
  3. The page loads without any custom CSS, and a banner at the top reads “Safe mode: custom CSS is turned off.” This is your site with just your theme, which confirms the problem is a CSS rule.
  4. In the banner, select Go fix your custom CSS to open the Custom CSS editor. You can also go to Website, then Custom CSS, yourself.
  5. Find the rule you changed most recently. To pause it, turn its Enabled switch off. To remove it, open the rule’s menu, select Delete, and confirm with Delete rule.
  6. Load your normal public site again, without /safe-mode, to check that it looks right.

Deleting a rule is permanent — there is no undo. If you might want the CSS back, copy it somewhere safe before you delete, or turn the rule off instead of deleting it.

If that didn’t work

Section titled “If that didn’t work”

If your site still looks wrong after you turn off or delete the rule:

  • Check whether more than one rule is involved. You might have a global rule and a per-page rule both in play. Turn each Enabled switch off one at a time to find the one causing the trouble.
  • Make sure you opened /safe-mode while signed in as an admin. Safe mode works only for signed-in admins — it is not a public switch, so your visitors always see your normal, fully styled site. If you’re signed out, or signed in as a regular member, /safe-mode just shows the normal site with no banner.
  • If the page also looks wrong at /safe-mode, the cause isn’t custom CSS — safe mode turns all of it off. Look at the page’s blocks in the page editor, or at your theme, instead.
  • If the page looks right at /safe-mode but wrong without it, a custom CSS rule is still on. Turn every rule’s Enabled switch off, then turn them back on one at a time until the problem returns.
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