Support Forum

Fizz:

I have a general question about the themes. I'm not overly sure how to activate them, I'm also having a hard time understanding which files link into each other. I understand that you have a general file which then hooks into several other files to get colors and such, but is there an alternative method which you can just use a straight CSS file. I'm okay with PHP, but I'm far stronger with CSS overall in general.

The only reason I ask is because I'm a little stumped right now, I've made next to no progress as everything I seem to alter doesn't seem to make any different to the overall appearance of the forum.

Mr Papa:

after this pm, please ask questions like this in the 5.0 themes forum... any answers and discussion may help others...  have you read the 5.0 forums topics for getting started with themes??

you select the theme you want on forum - themes - available themes

you dont really have to know much php to get around themes... generally they work just like wp themes... you have a bunch of template tags that you call to display forum elements...  there is a main css file (in this case its really a .php extension, but its 99% css) that you can edit to change stuff...  overlays are just an easy way to change a preset number of elements to affect colors, fonts, borders, etc... but the layout (forum elements displayed) stays the same...

dont want to make this too long because as I said would rather talk in the forum than pm... but...

just like wp we have a template hierarchy...  so wp has header.php, index.php, single.php, page.php, etc... we have spHead, spFoot, spGroupView, spForumView, etc...  basically for all the different 'views' or pages of the forum there is a different standard template...  spGroupView is the template that shows the main forum group view or the page with the list of groups and forums... spForumView is the template file that shows the forum view, that is the page with list of forums and topics...  and so forth..

now those are just basic templates... just like wp, you can create your own template files or include others or just plain write whatever php you want...

have a look in forum-themes/default/template-files to see some that we have with the default theme...

the css file will be in forum-themes/default/styles/default.php...  again, its basically just a css file but in php so we can do a bit of php code...  if you are creating your own theme, you can certainly have a .css file instead of a .php file...  as discussed in the getting started with themes topic in the 5.0 themes folder, you just specify what the stylesheet file is in the spTheme.txt file... again, see the default theme example...

if you want to see what template tags are available to be called look in plugins/simple-press/forum/content...  again, its organized mostly by the page view type... a file of template tags based on the pageview type...

now, almost every template tag has a bunch of default ids or classes applied to the display elements... but when you call the template tag, you can usually specific your own ids and classes and then style them in your css file...  or just use the default ids and classes and style them yourself...

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I've had a little look around but I can't seem to find the forum/theme menu. Am I the only one who isn't seeing this?, if so I would just be my luck.