Anyone have some advice about how best to go about customizing forum themes?  I don’t see a lot of diverse customization of forum templates on sites I’ve looked at… and there are so many templates to customize!  Any tips would help.

Most people, so far, have just modified the CSS and global headers, perhaps some breadcrumbs and page headers, too.  I’ve done quite a bit on thread_rows and stuff.  What are you looking, specifically, to accomplish?

First step, which you shouldn’t skip. DUPLICATE THE DEFAULT TEMPLATE. Don’t work on the original, in fact don’t even make the default template writable. By making a duplicate, you always have something to easily fall back on or compare.

As for the actual templates, you’re going to have dive in and get your hands dirty . Like EE, it seems overwhelming at first, but it DOES make sense and there is a logic to the design. It just gets a little insane with the shades of purple and different link styles. Try to change colors at first, so you figure out the structure and then you can try and get more fancy.

You can go through the CSS template and figure out the colors via the hex numbers. I did this by cutting and pasting the hex numbers into Photoshop. Make a photshop document with all these colors in one document, so you can see the color palette as designed. Then you can assign your own colors and the various shades.

When changing the actual graphic files, I kept the original graphic on separate layer and used that as a model to change it to what I wanted it to look like.

Good advice, LisaJill and Brandon.  Getting my hands dirty sounds like the solution.  I had earlier used a theme from phpbb-design.com, and perhaps something of those older stylesheets can be picked up and modified.

The style was a modified Nosebleed—http://www.phpbb-design.com/phpBB2_styles_demo/theme/?s=17— with much less hematoma and hemorrhage in actual application.  It’s a very simple and elegant style, and I reckon I’ll try to recreate it.

That should be fairly easy to replicate, to be honest.  You only really have to edit a few files - mostly css at that.  Possibly some of the _row templates to get rid of “extra” information.

Now if you want to make it entirely css…. have fun! *disappears*

Now if you want to make it entirely css…. have fun! *disappears*

:: GRINS ::
Edit-Add…If you do get ambitious and manage to go straight CSS, please write up a guide!!!

Yes, while pure CSS is my aim and predilection, I do have a day job.  I’ll keep ya’ll posted….