Shipping Estimator Questions for Popup and In-Line Cart Views

A couple questions surrounding the Shipping Estimator...

I had an issue with the popup Shipping Estimator, whereby my site's background image was being included in the popup, making it impossible to read the text. I found and tried all the forum CSS solutions for this problem by setting the background-color property of #popupShippingEstimator and the .shippingEstimatorWrapper to #FFFFFF, etc. This somewhat resolved the problem, but then the site's background image was still displaying in the popup window for the few seconds it takes the shipping estimator to load, *then *the background would change to white, at which point I was able to see and enter my country, state, and zip info. The only forum suggestion I did not try was creating a white.gif image and setting that as a background image for the popup - seemed like a band-aid workaround.

To me, having my site's striped background image load in the popup for a few seconds before going away gave it a bit of a broken feel, so I decided to instead try the shipping estimator in-line on the shopping cart page through the Admin settings.

As it turns out, I'm liking the in-line cart option better than the popup, with one exception: when the cart page initially loads (so, no entries yet made into Country, State, and Zip fields), the first two rows of the #shippingEstimatorTable are displayed (the row stating that "Shipping quotes are based on..." and "Available Shipping Methods"). Of course, with no destination info entered, no rates are displayed, as would be expected.

I would think that only the Country/State/Zip fields (and Update button) should be displayed when going to the Cart page, with with no part of the Shipping Estimator table visible until after Country/State/Zip information is input by the customer. DivaVocals posted a similar question back in August regarding eliminating the shipping table header rows, but the scenario was a little different than mine, and I couldn't get the solution to work.

So:

• How would I change the in-line Shipping Estimator so that ***only ***the destination entry fields are displayed until input is submitted, and
• Does anyone know how I could resolve the popup background image issue I described, as I would still like to get that working smoothly.
  Thanks in advance,
  -DBB1

Although not the finest coding ever... i've got something that works for 139h if you're interested?

Guest loads up the cart, only country and state/province show with a new Update Shipping Estimate button. Once you click the button, the code finds the shipping rates just as it normally would operate.

Twitch.

Thanks, Twitchtoo.

I'm using ZC v1.51. But I finally got the Shipping Estimator tamed, to a degree. I fiddled with the code I referenced in my original post, and was able to get the Estimator's table heading to show up only when destination information is entered. With some additional work I was able to limit input to use only the Zip code, as I've got the store already defaulting to US, and figured having state information isn't really required when calculating rates based on zip code.

So, the attached images show the cart as it exists when initially viewed, while the second image shows the resulting Shipping Estimator after having entered a destination zip code.

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My challenge now is to tighten up the wasted space on the bottom area of the Shipping Estimator and/or center column so it doesn't push my footer down (also viewable in the images). I use Firebug and Web Developer to identify page elements, but so far I haven't been successful in removing this wasted using CSS. Any ideas here?

I've given up on the popup Shipping Estimator; I've never been able to eliminate the "pre-loading" of my site's background image, before the CSS settings kick in and remove it.

-DBB1