Here on the expressionengine site the forum is not on the same “site” as the rest of expressionengine.com. What I mean is that it doesn’t have the same header/footer and looks different, compared to, for example the forum module found in the Drupal CMS.
I would rather see a forum that is more like drupals, where it is more embedded into the site. Is this possible or is it always like this? There are many cheap or free forums that work just like this one, so buying the forum module doesn’t make much sense to me unless it’s more embedded into the site than this one is.
I’ve never actually used the forum module but I do know that you can make it look however you want. I have heard that admittedly there is a little more ground work involved to get it to look exactly how you want but there is nothing stopping you from making your forum look exactly the same as the rest of your site. I know of a lot of users on here who have made their forum installations look exactly like the rest of their site.
That’s the great thing about ExpressionEngine, you aren’t tied down to how anything looks, it’s entirely up to you to lay things out the way you like.
Hope that helps a bit?
Well, I can ofcourse alter the css and other things to make it look like the rest of the site, but how about header and footer? Right now, this forum, for example feels like it’s on a separate site. Even though the login and member things are integrated.
In our case this is intentional, adamos. You’ll notice that all of the portions of our site that make up User Support have a common menu, markup, headers, etc. We treat our support areas as a mini-site to help users navigate between the resources more easily and without the distraction of anything sales or product related. You’re free to develop your forum theme in whatever fashion you like. If you run the forums through the regular template engine, this can even include the use of {embed=} to use common source for all parts of your site.
Took a bit of work and tweaking though. All in all not too bad once you get familiar with how the templates work on the forums and where everything is located.
Took a bit of work and tweaking though. All in all not too bad once you get familiar with out the templates work on the forums and where everything is located.
That’s exactly what I’m looking for!
Do you think you could write some info down on how to achieve it? I’m looking into buying EE, so I want to make sure I will be able to do it. I usually never have much problems tweaking templates, but I haven’t used many CMS’s before.
Gah, I was worried it might confuse you. As Derek mentioned, you can use the regular template engine to add any parts of the site you want. You will always have forum elements on the page though, and the control panel demo shows what those might look like.
Here’s one example of taking one of the basic forum themes, running it through the standard template parser, and putting into the layout of the site. Here’s another.
Took a bit of work and tweaking though. All in all not too bad once you get familiar with out the templates work on the forums and where everything is located.
That’s exactly what I’m looking for!
Do you think you could write some info down on how to achieve it? I’m looking into buying EE, so I want to make sure I will be able to do it. I usually never have much problems tweaking templates, but I haven’t used many CMS’s before.
Well, it would take too long for me to do a write up on how to achieve it. It took me a few weeks of tweaking to achieve it myself, but since I’m more familiar now, I suppose the next one won’t take as long.
I’ll do you one better though. I’ve been planning this for a little while now as I’ve had quite a few requests for it, I’m planning on developing my own forum theme based off of the one you see on my golf site. Once I’ve developed it, I’ll just release it for anyone to use. I can’t make any promises, but I want to have it done sometime in the near future.
I’m working on a forum customization right now, after playing around with the template components in the trial, and it all seems pretty straightforward. I’m brand new to EE, though, and for various logistical reasons have to migrate the forum before the rest of the site, so I’m wondering — can you guys elaborate on “run the forums through the regular template engine” and “running it through the standard template parser”?
I’m working on a forum customization right now, after playing around with the template components in the trial, and it all seems pretty straightforward. I’m brand new to EE, though, and for various logistical reasons have to migrate the forum before the rest of the site, so I’m wondering — can you guys elaborate on “run the forums through the regular template engine” and “running it through the standard template parser”?
By the way, the best example I’ve been able to find of a really customized EE forum — as opposed to more simply changing some of the colors and/or putting a wrapper around it — is AppleMatters. But it does that jumping thing where it starts to load some otherwise formatted version of a page and then jumps to the finished version. (Is there a technical term for that?) Is that perhaps because they’re running it through the regular tempate engine?
karentempler, I think what you might be seeing, is a flash of unstyled content (FOUC), and is not related to running the forums through the template engine. EE outputs its content all at once, so its rendered by the browser identically to static files.
