Thread

Hello

I’ve looked up documentation and related info about creating custom template for the forum module. The big answer is YES, you can do all that, etc. My problem is no where i could find specific instruction how to go about doing it. I have two related questions.

Knowing the fact that i can modify one of the theme templates out of the box. When looking at the theme folder, i see about 50 template files in there. Question: where i do begin? I need to see some sort of visual structure in order to modify it, and don’t know where to find this. Maybe i’ll find out eventually after hours of analyzing all the code, maybe some one can just tell me the scope quickly.

The second and related question:
I’m running 2 web sites each with a separate forum under the same   EE installation. What i want is to assign each of the 2 forums each with its own custom design theme—that is, users are not allowed to switch between the themes as this will defeat my purpose of creating custom themes. How do i accomplish this?

Thank you very much.
Steven.

Just finished two of them, once one learns the ropes it’s surprisingly easy.

Trying t remember it here. Will give what I recall right now.
In the global templates, header and footer took care of most of it.
Below the body tag, I added my site header, navbar, and site wrapper.
header has topbar/header/logo for design.
Overall container that sets width.
navbar.
wrapper that has the background for site.

There was some existing stuff at the top I deleted, some moved, and removed/resized a couple td’s around the existing logo.

Then closed it all in the footer. I think I changed the width of the table to 98%.
Then look at the frum in firefox.
right click and view some of the bars/images to see name and path.
Look those up (use find) in the css.
Open images folder where you can see them all as thumbs, after a bit it will cometogether.
I redid the images (have a backup folder) in photoshop and left names the same.

A good way to find parts is to view source and see the classes/id’s for various parts, then look in css to redo.

That will get you partly through 😊

A client just asked same thing about not changing themes, easy way is to delete them from server, and I think in the footer delete the dropdown.

Hope that helps a little.

Thanks for your time Bruce. Your instruction makes sense.

I figured it has to do with modifying the templates. I also discovered that simply removing the theme folders from the server can limit what user can select. I just thought there was some setting under EE’s admin area that controls whether users can select the themes or not. And removing the drop down for theme selection is a cleaner solution.

Thanks again.
Steven

Bruce nailed it in detail- but yep, you can either remove the select form from the template, or remove the folders entirely.  I generally remove the select.  Since you’re on MSM, should be able to set a different default theme in the cp and have it work like your going for.

As to editing- sometimes folks find it helpful to edit the php files directly- it’s a little easier to search, see all of the elements in a given area at once, etc.  And as long as the basic table structure is workable?  The main places you’ll need to hit are header, footer and css.

I just finished customizing a forum template myself, and one thing I would have liked to know beforehand is:

The popup windows you get when clicking on links in “Member List” and some of the member area like the emoticons popup use a conditional {if show_headings} in the member_page() main method of the theme_member class. That conditional is what makes it possible to filter out navbar etc… So be careful on how you setup theme_global.php or else, like me, you might end up with all your site structure in those popup windows…

Also, a trick that I used a lot to quickly find from which template something is coming from: do a search for a specific message in the language file, then search for the corresponding language tag in the template. That’s also helpful to make sure you don’t miss any template when changing something globally since there’s quite a bit of redundancy in this template system…

Hope that helps… 😊

Hey Robin and minimal design, thanks for your additional input which is all helpful. It’s a time saver learning from someone else’s mistakes. ExpressionEngine is a flexible system, though you’ll need to find out where the pieces are, what each one does, and how they all work together.

Cheers } Steven

Glad it helps- and yep, EE is a lot to wrap your brain around.  Particularly the forum templates- I still have to hunt around sometimes to find what I’m looking for!  Folks who alter them frequently are no doubt more up on that than I am.

Hello people,
Sorry to jump in but this is sort of the same point so I hope you dont’ mind me tagging along this topic.

I did read that nesting core templates ( into forum and memeber) is not allowed….does this really mean that forum themes are ‘stand alone’ and have to be designed separatly from the core site? (kinda got spoiled & lazy with includes and nested templates)
😊
Thanks for your time!

Yes, forum themes are standalone. We’ve included the Developer theme to aid in theming                               .

Its best to yes.
Not recommended but apparently doable, docs - Forums -  Other Features

You can enable PHP to be used in the Forum Templates if you wish. This is done under Default Preferences. You can do this if you wish to include other PHP scripts, such as banner ads. As with regular ExpressionEngine Templates, you can choose whether the PHP is executed on “Input” or “Output”.

See:

Running the Forums Through Regular Templates
By default, the Forum Module utilizes its own light-weight template display engine, rather than utilizing main templating system in ExpressionEngine. The consequence of this, though, is that you can’t use general EE Tags, global variables, conditionals, or similar in the forum templates since they won’t be parsed.

For a way if one has to… sorry Sue, cross posted

Thanks Sue and Bruce for confirming this, and yes theming in EE is GREAT comapred to other php include nightmare in other CMS/forum apps.
Thanks again for the quick follow up, you guys are great!

Housekeeping: Closing the thread..