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Hi everyone,

I am trying to figure out what is the best way to customize the EE forums:

Do you download the html and css to a text editor or do you work inside EE and make changes to the css.

Is there a user document for forum customization?

What version and build of EE are you using? That said, the forums can be customized by modifying the Forum templates. I’m not sure what you mean by “best way”, I am not aware of another one, in fact.

EE 1.6.9.

How do you work on the html part since they are in different folders and in EE syntax which my editor don’t read right. I am still learning about different stuff.

Thanks a lot for the reply.

Hi, anoopbal.

What I do when customizing the forum is take the Developer theme, make a copy of that, and then start working on that particular theme.

It’s going to take a lot of testing and fiddling to get things to look exactly the way you want them to, but it’s doable.

You can use FTP and modify the individual files, but you’ll need to spend some time seeing how they interrelate.

Sorry to not have a more robust method for creating themes.

Thanks Sue.

I am almost there ( and it is not that hard (:-). One question I have is when I download the html files, I don’t which order they go into my text editor since it is all in different folders. How do you download the html files, Sue?

Sorry for the simple questions. I will post it once I am done.

I’m not sure what you mean? The various files correspond to various parts of the theme. There is no particular order that you need to adhere to.

So all the html templates you put into one html file and work with it? or you work with them individually.

So all the html templates you put into one html file and work with it? or you work with them individually.

I don’t understand the question.
The forum themes consist of a large number of files - maybe 20 or so, which are each php files…...and one css file.

Of course, these are often related and include each other when EE is working, but you have to customize each one individually…that is, those which contain parts you need to work on.

A lot of the forum theme in in the CSS. Other parts might be images which you add…and you have to place them in the proper places or call them in using include or something else.

It’s not an easy task! EE 1.x forums are not really designed for easy skinning and customizing, but I think they include a number of various theme now…..personally I would work with one of those and slightly customize it (logos, graphics, headers, footers, etc.).....

See enclosed for sample list of files which make up the default forum theme.
As examples, inside the images files are various folder graphics and stuff like that. You could change those….ideally leaving them the same size and file type, and that would show up as custom.

Or, if you were going to add different logos and links on most forum pages…you would work in the theme_global.php file or the theme_index.php…...

Does that help any, or is what you want to do deeper than that?

Thanks for the assist, Craig.

anoopbal, as Craig mentioned, look via FTP and you’ll see where they are stored at. /themes/forum_themes/developer , etc.

Hi everyone,
Do you download the html and css to a text editor or do you work inside EE and make changes to the css.

I’m not sure if we clearly answered that part of the question!

I would not work inside EE for the editing. In fact, although you can see all of the code there, the docs often don’t have the proper permissions set for editing.

My technique, which only involves small changes, is to use an FTP program in combination with a text editor…..an example on the mac is that Fetch (FTP) can open documents in BBedit ($) or in TextWrangler (free). If you then make a change and hit the save button, the file is saved on the remote server….

For longer situations you have the right idea - to download the entire folder (or use the copy you already have on your computer) and do all the changes there and then upload. This might not be a good idea on a “live” installation! At least with the small changes I made, I can check the results instantly and then adjust if needed.

Of course, always have a backup of the most recent theme which actually works properly!

anoopbal, does what handyman said make sense?

And to add to what he says… most of the forums that I have modified I have only really needed to dig into the CSS and make changes there. Most of the time you will just want to change colors to match a site more closely and that can all be accomplished in the CSS file.

Let us know if we can help any more.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to reply!

Here is the forum now:

http://www.exercisebiology.com/index.php/forums/

Instead of downloading the php files. I opened up it in a browser, open the page source code, saved the html file and opened it in text editor and edited it. I did the same to the CSS file too. This way everything was in order and was somewhat easy.

Hope it makes sense.

Looks good! Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.