Thread

No, I gave up in disgust after a while (read: the client decided it wasn’t worth my time / his money)... Let’s see if Randy has anything to contribute.

I can customize the member profile themes/forum themes in about 2 hours.  But I only make the colors and width match, and change the public member profile page.  It depends on the scope of your changes, really.  PXLated takes longer because he likes to make them table-less, which does involve every template.  If you’re comfortable with the basic layout and just want it to match, its not a hard thing to do.

can you give me a hint: about how long it takes to make it to its own, unique look?

Hard to say without knowing exactly what you’re changing and even then probably hard to tell.

I did it a few versions ago and it took me the better part of a day just to get my bearings as to what did what, that was before there were any Wiki entries or anything about the member area. And a couple of days for coding but I eliminated all tables and did a pure CSS version. Of course, the whole membership area changed a couple of updates later so all that was wasted.

To be honest, until the membership templates become less complex or there is an easier way to deal with them I’m not sure I would hack much beyond just the CSS again. I suspect that the membership area will change considerably with EE2.0 if they implement a request for those of us that work in the corporate arena, assign members to multiple groups would really be helpful for intranet sites.

Edit-Add: LJ - “he likes to make them table-less”...Yep, I’m the table nazi 😊

I just did a member template customization this week. It IS tedious.

The easiest thing is to just change the color scheme. The way I did it was to copy the style sheet into Dreamweaver, which for me, is easier to edit in than doing it all in the EE back end.

I made a list of all the color references.

Then, in Photoshop, I made little swatches of all the default colors, and then made swatches of my preferred color palette, so I could “map” my new colors to the old colors.

Be sure to make a copy of the default theme and rename it to your custom theme. After you upload it, you can specify which theme you want. So, if your customization endeavor goes awry, you haven’t broken your default templates!

I opened all the associated images for the member templates in Photoshop and then set my preferred color to the foreground and chose Image->Adjustments->Hue/Saturation and clicked the “Colorize” box. That changes the existing color to the new one very quickly.

Then, I did a find/replace on the colors in the style sheet, and then copied and pasted the new one into EE.

I’ve also done a couple of customizations where I’ve removed the default “page header” and replaced it with my site’s logo and navigation on top, moved around some of the elements AND resized all the tables so they weren’t so wide, but that all takes considerably more time and effort.

Just as a note - if you start with the developer theme then you won’t have images to customize, for the most part (you’ll have the Legends images, but not all the new topic type buttons) - so for those not good with Photoshop (like me, I don’t even own it) - the developer theme is the best to start with.  It probably is anyway as its made for that purpose.

Thanks for posting your experiences, Debra, as well.  I know they’ll help someone =)  I can’t say I experienced difficulties with resizing the tables - I do that with every installation and it only takes a few minutes and there’s a wiki article on doing that too, and the navigation is in the HTML Header and Page Header, so mostly only one template.

But, like the normal templates, this does get easier after the first run. =)

After all - i just made the CSS and few background pics and thats what i wanted at this point. No need to fix any tables etc. So it was pretty fast operation. Took me little over 1 hour to make colours like i wanted. Phew (at the moment…need a break heh)

Thanks!
- Tuittu

Just as a note - if you start with the developer theme then you won’t have images to customize, for the most part (you’ll have the Legends images, but not all the new topic type buttons) - so for those not good with Photoshop (like me, I don’t even own it) - the developer theme is the best to start with.  It probably is anyway as its made for that purpose.

This may be a stupid question but here goes: where can I get the developer theme? Is it publicly available?

ChrisClark, the developer theme comes with the forums. You’ll see it in the forum_themes directory in the download.

Oh, okay. Well, I guess I’m out of luck, as I don’t have a forums license. Thanks anyway.

I wish to God you could use template tags in custom templates. I understand the issues involved in doing that, but it just irk’s me. Then at least I could wrap the member area in my current site template and have it be a PART of the site. Theres no integration as is though, and even if I go through all the work to do it, I cannot have anything dynamic (weblog, template tag) there.. besides the fact that when I change a look/menu/whatever, it’s static on all my custom templates. There has to be a way around this.

I five-thousandth this. The new theme is way better because it has wonderful contrast. I would be [edit]extremely happy[/i] to get the new themes as the default.