Thread

I wanted to throw a few questions out to some of the more experienced EE users out there. My last site was built with geeklog and it became a considerable maintenance burden what with all my custom theme elements making for loads of rework every time an update came out.

I’ve embarked on a new site development with EE and had lots of fun learning the templating systems and building my new design and structures. However, once I strayed into the member modules and forum areas I found EE wasn’t quite as polished as what I was expecting:

1. these modules are a potential theming nightmare with a huge number of templates.
2. there are tables everywhere.
3. the forum member control panels differ from the main site control panels.
4. the wiki theme (and others?) have code embedded amidst the theming elements.
5. there isn’t a nice generic contemporary theme for the forum or wiki.

I’ve worked the forum control panel/member functions back through my main site. I’ve successfully reworked a fair amount of the forum and member function themes but there’s a lot of overlap in styles and I feel constrained in what I can do but don’t want to diverge too far from “stock”.

While I love the main EE functionality and templating systems, it feels like the forum and the member functions are the hidden underbelly and not anywhere as nice to work with - and the polish evident here on EE certainly propagates that perception. So my worry is, if I expend a load more effort (I’m not a designer by trade) on the forum, wiki, member functions, login, logout screen, search screens, error screens etc etc am I actually digging myself a big hole maintenance wise when new releases come out?

Would I be better off just customising the main “blog” part of the site and leaving everything else fairly stock, but maybe rework the headers and footers and base colours?

This site (EE.com) is a fabulous advertisement for EE, but that same design polish isn’t evident in the default themes available in the wiki, forum and related parts of the engine. If it were I could probably happily leave these parts “stock” and thereby save myself much potential future “tweaking” to cope with platform updates.

Anyway, I really do like the core EE capabilities and components, but I’m unsure how to best deal with the supporting infrastructure components so any comments would be most appreciated!

Forum themes are a PITA to theme in any scenario.  The difference between a forum and the rest of the templates is that forums are much more standard and have a ton of details that have to be dealt with.  I am not sure there is a good way to make forums easy to theme outside of simple color changes.  However, this is not necessarily the case with the wiki and the member templates.

You could check out the User module from Solspace.  That module gives you much more flexibility over customizing many of the member elements (allows you to create the forms in the regular templates.)

I have to admit that I have not messed much with the wiki themes but the wiki seems to be the most simple to me.  I would think that once you have the other two problems taken care of the wiki should not be too tough. 

I wouldn’t worry about compatibility problems though EE 2.0 might be much better for addressing your concerns.  I can’t say that you won’t have more pain in the future to rework things, I just wouldn’t let these problems stop me. 

I’m sure the developers are working hard to make sure hard work in templates won’t be lost with future updates but on the other hand, if a new templating system made life considerably easier then I probably wouldn’t complain if I did have to rework things.

My 2 cents 😉

David, have a look at the Minimalist forum theme, which might give you a good starting point for the forum/member templates.  The default themes are somewhat more complex from the simple need that the themes have to include all available features of the Forum module.  The Minimalist theme, which I created outside of the default package of themes, does not share that restriction.  So you’ll find that it may be easier to work with, but you might also find that it’s missing too many things; it just depends on what you are looking for.  Both included wiki themes are contemporary, though naturally one’s taste will differ.  There’s no code embedded within these templates, though, so I’m puzzled by your statement that there is.

On all fronts, our Update instructions always include Version Notes (the forum and wiki modules have their own version notes), which will take you through any changes you need to make to your custom themes to stay in lock step with the software.  They’re typically very easy, and are a matter of cutting and pasting a few snippets here and there.  So I wouldn’t fear about straying too far from the default themes - though I would always work from a copy or fresh theme, not modifying the default themes.  That way you have no fear of overwriting your customizations by an accidental file upload.