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Theme development - an introduction? [message #18441] Sat, 22 May 2004 22:00 Go to next message
lahoo is currently offline  lahoo   Sweden
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Registered: April 2004
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You guys out there who have made your own customised themes might want to join this thread to enlighten the rest of us on the proceedings.

1) Are themes forum upgrade proof?
With this I 'm interested in knowing if effort spent customising the forum will be flushed down the drain when upgrading to a new release of FUD or if they're future proof?

2) Where to start?
Having lots of ideas for layout improvements but where should I start looking for how to implement them?
There are tons and tons of template files etc. but few clues on how to go from an idea to a solution.
- Which file provides which functionality?
- Which page is built from which templates and which pages are affected by changes to a template file?
If you know and have been through the struggle please consider making life for the rest of us easier.

Finally.
3) How does one package a theme so that others can reuse it?
Where can/are users share their modifications in a true GPL free software spirit?

I'm pro software freedom in the degrees outlined by Richard Stallman but in order to act in that sence I'd like to see more user to user discussions here. As it is today most of the discussions on this forum is a dialogue between one user and the development team. Are there other places where actual FUD forum users are sharing thoughts, ideas, work etc? Please inform me.
Re: Theme development - an introduction? [message #18447 is a reply to message #18441] Sun, 23 May 2004 16:46 Go to previous message
Ilia is currently offline  Ilia   Canada
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Themes survivability generally depends on the changes a new version of the forum introduces. If the underlying .tmpl file had not changed between your current & new version you are upgrading to then your modifications will survive the upgrade, otherwise they will be over-written.

Consequently I try to limit the changes to commonly modified file such as header.tmpl, footer.tmpl & forum.css.tmpl to ensure that fewest number of people possible are affected by the changes.

When a modified template is overwritten, the original is backed up to allow for an easy restoration process.

The forum's built-in template editor has some description that should give you some idea as to what most template files do.


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