Support Forum

Hey Robert,

I'm not sure if there is any documentation on this one, but you can add a background image to any section using the overlays, stylesheet, templates and an images folder in the theme. I am going to assume that you are proficient with basic editing as it's the only way I know of to achieve this.

Simply create an image you want to use for your background, add it to a folder in your theme, then in the overlay file you are using you can add the call to the image as a variable such as:

$yourImage='url("images/yourImageName.png")';

Then simply call this variable in your theme stylesheet like:

background: <?php echo($yourImage); ?>;

So, adding an image to a forum group header depending what theme you are using you would have to tackle the template differently. Looking at the template spGroupView.php, Unified theme provides a group header class in the form of a section start and end, which you could apply a background image to in the stylesheet (unified.php), whereas Default theme does not, and instead wraps the entire group in the section including the header name, description and the forums.

You can create a header at the top of the groups in Default theme by adding a section start such as Unified does:

sp_SectionStart('tagClass=spGroupViewHeader', 'header');

And close the section after all the header information with

sp_SectionEnd('', 'header');

The tagClass 'spGroupViewHeader' would be the class you will add the background image to.

I would probably recommend using .png files with an alpha layer (transparency) as it should give you flexibility with things like edges, but I have not played around with this myself so can't advise more I'm afraid.

You can also be specific about the width of the container that has the background image. For example you can set a div to be width: 600px, and you can make your background image 600px wide. Again this would probably take some experimentation to get right factoring in the overall width of your forum, and the overall width of the list section which houses the groups.

I would say the best thing to do is play around with it. If you get stuck I will gladly investigate further locally when I get time.

Well you can put any images you want to use as custom images in your theme/images folder (sp-resources > forum-themes > yourtheme > images)

It's really straight forward when you get used to how the templates, stylesheet and overlays work with each other. You might want to start by taking a look at the Themes entry in the Codex.

If it's just colour changes you want to make, you can achieve that best through just CSS, but unfortunately I don't know a way of having different coloured forum groups as it's just one section in the template repeated for all forums.

You can however have a custom icon for each board set up in the forums section of the admin panel.

We always recommend making a custom or Child Theme to preserve any changes you might make to one of the stock themes.