Creating your own Phorum template ================================= This documents describes how to create your own template for Phorum. The document is not conclusive, but there should be enough information in here to get you started. Here are the steps that you have to take to create your own template: 1) Take the default template directory from {phorum dir}/templates/default and copy it over to another directory, for example {phorum dir}/templates/mytemplate. 2) Edit {phorum dir}/templates/mytemplate/info.php. In this file you have to edit at least the $name variable, e.g. to $name = "My very own template"; You can hide the template from the user's template selection box by setting $template_hide = 1. If you do this, you can only select this template through the admin interface (this makes most sense if you set the display-settings to fixed through the admin interface). 3) Open Phorum's admin page {phorum url}/admin.php and go to "General Settings". There you'll find the option "Default Template". Set that option to your own template. You can also set a specific template for each single forum in the forum's settings. That's it. You are now using your own template. From here on you can start tweaking the template files in your {phorum dir}/templates/mytemplate directory. For most installations, the following template files will be most interesting: - header.tpl The header which will be added before each page; - footer.tpl The footer which will be added after each page; - settings.tpl Here you can change colors and fonts; - css.tpl This file holds all CSS definitions for Phorum. For more extended information on changing template files, please visit our Wiki documentation site: http://phorum.org/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/TemplatesDocs TODO this should probably go to the wiki, becuase it's quite specific for a getting started HOWTO... Additional variables in settings.tpl: {define bodies_in_list 1} set this to 1 to have the message-bodies loaded in the list if your template needs them. {define all_bodies_in_threaded_read 0} set this to 1 to have all the message-bodies also loaded in threaded-read-view if your template needs them