I'm kinda new at this Bulletin Board software. I would like to use it on my website but I would like to have it customized, much like this one is. Can someone tell me how they were able to put the WestHost Members Area header at the top of the BB and also the links and copyright at the bottom of the BB? What does it involve? Thanks
I'm kinda new at this Bulletin Board software. I would like to use it on my website but I would like to have it customized, much like this one is. Can someone tell me how they were able to put the WestHost Members Area header at the top of the BB and also the links and copyright at the bottom of the BB? What does it involve? Thanks
You can edit the header in templates/subSilver/overall_header.tpl and you can edit the footer in templates/subSilver/overall_footer.tpl
Of course if you are using a skin other than "subSilver" you will want to look in that skin directory instead. User contributed phpBB skins tend to have many coding variations but I think that those 2 files should be in all of them.
The other file that you want to look at is the stylesheet or .css file that is in the template directory that you are using. It controls colors fonts and some of the images used in the look.
It would be a good idea to make a copy of the templates/subSilver directory that you can modify and leave the orginal as is. The reason is that manytimes the updates/upgrades of the board involve editing the original theme and if you change it then I can be hard to figure out what you want changes. Also if you decide to install Easymod which is a addon for the board that makes it easier to install mods then it looks for the subSilver directory first and then looks for other themes after that.
Each time a page is displayed on the phpBB forum it uses a min of three template files. overall_header.tpl, overall_footer.tpl and then inserts the .tpl file(s) for that section in between. If I am remembering the subSilver theme it has a split table between the header and footer templates. If you use an editor that is visual for creating your webpages it can help to make a dummy.html file that you cut and past the content from the header and footer templates or better yet view a page in your browser and save it to your local computer. That way you can better see what the end result would be. There are tags in the templates that look like this {SOME_WORD}. These are replaced by dynamic content generated by the php files.
Hope that helps some. Let us know if you have further questions.