I’m new to this. Actually I’m new to wordpress but I’m doing my best.
I can’t seem to figure out where the icon sets and badges are. I saw a preview someone did for simple press and I thought I saw a link to download icons and badges. What am I missing?
It might have been really old… a while back, in SP 4.x, we had skins… which meant very limited ability to control the way the forums looked… but we did have a series of icons (called icon sets) that you could download to change up the appearance a bit…
but fast forward to the 5.x series launched at beginning of this year… skins were gone and themes were in… with themes, you are in complete control of the appearance… you can easily add, remove or move elements around… SP now has themes that are very much like WP themes… so you have nearly complete control over the appearance of your forum… take a look at our showcase page to see some different examples…
within the sp theme you are using, and we provide 4 with the core package, you will see an images folder… these are the equivalent of the old 4.x icons… you can simply replace those images with any image you choose… we do of course recommend that you make your own theme vs editing one of ours to keep from losing changes on upgrades (see http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/themes/theme-basics/creating-a-theme/)…
or, using the link in our sidebar, we can help you come up with a completely custom theme too…
as to badges… they go with forum ranks, special ranks and usergroups… again, do a google search and find any series of forum rank images you like (here is good one: http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=209) and using our admin panel interface can upload the badges to either ranks or usergroups…
hope that helps… but come on back if you have more questions or need more info… we are here to help…
ok so I need to go find individual rank badge images and upload them?
I saw badge sets as a zip but it’s not just the images. there’s code in the zip file as well.
It would be nice if you had a standard set included
I guess we could consider that but most users want to create their own and have something personalised to their site and circumstances.
I’m beginning to understand.
This is a huge learning curve for me.
Not only am I creating a place to serve up my tutorials and consultation, but I’m creating a membership program, forum, and affiliate program that all have to sync on a multisite installation on one domain name and two themes.
The wordpress dash and admin bar are a trick, and so is the forum integration.
I’ll be glad when it all works like I want it to. I’m getting tired fast.
Thank you for your help. I hope simple press will be THE forum for my site. I chose it over bbpress.
Question. Do I need to maintain the membership here for support, or for updates to the software, or both?
I”ll likely stay a member for the support, but I want to know the details of how you operate
the membership gives you access to the plugins, support forum and codex… once you have a plugin, you can continue to use and get updates after the membership expires… but you won’t be able to download any new plugins…
feel free to ask any questions and we can help you…
Our company plans to stay with the gold membership yearly…. I second the thought that you guys need a badge and icon package…. I think it would be fairly simple for you all to do and it would make it much easier for beginners to use. As your clients become more familiar with this process they can change them to their own icons and such. I think this would be a great thing to have at the paying customers diposal
thanks for the input. kind of hard to make badges and icons for unknown sp themes… but will pass along to our graphics folks…
The Custom Forum Icons are 32×32 pixel pngs.
I’ve used the ones from this (simple press support) site for a few jobs. Attached ZIP contains the Life Belt, Wand, Bullhorn, Lightbulb and Basket
For Forum Ranks, I tend to start wiht the Gold/Silver/VIP badges from this site (I think they’re pretty darn good):
If you’ve got Photoshop (or something free like Paint.Net) it’s fairly straightforward to tweak them
e.g. “Therapist badge:
We had another badge for a rank that was kind of a cross between an analyst and a therapist, but we couldn’t come up with a good name.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrIpPqcln6Y
