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Hacking phpBB templates

Frus­tra­tion is try­ing to get a phpBB forum to look like it belongs with Word­Press blog, by modi­fy­ing a phpBB template.

The ori­ginal concept for the Peel Dis­trict Moun­tain Bike Club web­site was a Word­Press blog, with the ever pop­u­lar Con­nec­tions theme and a cus­tom header graphic. It took me less than forty minutes to set up and most of that time was spent doing a cus­tom header graphic.

Adding a forum was the next step, as men­tioned earlier at first I thought about Drupal for both the site and the forum, but that required me to learn all about Drupal, and see­ing I knew a lot about Word­Press and was famil­iar with phpBB as a user, I assumed that using Word­Press and phpBB would be the quicker and easier option. I am hav­ing second thoughts now.

Get­ting Word­Press and phpBB to play together, or at least to dis­play inform­a­tion from the other applic­a­tion is not dif­fi­cult. The big prob­lem I am hav­ing is try­ing to get Word­Press and phpBB to look the same by modi­fy­ing the phpBB theme. This is not dif­fi­cult task, it is just time con­sum­ing. I spent most of last week­end modi­fy­ing the tem­plate files and I am still not happy with the results.

The prob­lem is that I could only find one CSS driven tem­plate for phpBB, Bones. While it is far super­ior to any table driven tem­plate, the HTML code is in my opin­ion prim­it­ive, suf­fers from excess­ive use of classes and the css file is over 1000 lines longs. in defense the tem­plate is a couple of years old and the code and css is not dis­sim­ilar to what I was writ­ing a few years earlier.

Know­ing what I know now, I would advise against tak­ing the route I took, it is a time con­sum­ing and frus­trat­ing route. That said instead of tak­ing the easy way out and repla­cing everything with Drupal, I have down­loaded eXtreme style mod and will attempt to rewrite the tem­plates into HTML and CSS table­less layout.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 12th, 2006 at 3:45 pm and is filed under css and html . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “Hacking phpBB templates”

  1. Matt Says:
    March 14th, 2006 at 7:08 am

    Did you con­cider bbPress, Nick?

    Matt Mul­leg­wen wrote that as well and they seem to play reas­on­ably nicely together.

  2. nick Says:
    March 14th, 2006 at 9:37 am

    Matt

    Did not know about bbPress until you told me. Looks like I will be spend­ing this week­end invest­ig­at­ing it futher, looks inter­est­ing though.

  3. Simon Says:
    March 31st, 2006 at 3:01 pm

    Nick, I star­ted down the same path as you this morn­ing and came across this post while search­ing in frus­tra­tion. How far along did you get with doing a prop­per lay­out with phpbb? I’m going to have a look at bbPress tomor­row too.

    Cheers, Simon.

  4. nick Says:
    April 1st, 2006 at 10:06 am

    Simon

    Not far enough, but it is in use: http://pdmbc.com/phpBB/

    The first level, the forum index is good, works well (once I fix the top nav), good nav­ig­a­tion
    The second level, which phpBB calls “view forum”, is miss­ing nav­ig­a­tion, no easy way back to the forum index
    The third level, which php call “view topic” is poor, too busy, it does not need the right side­bar, there is no nav back to view forum or the forum index and my css in incomplete.

    Three choices:
    1. Fix it (which will take some fancy foot­work inside phpBB as well as time to CSS right)
    2. Replace the theme with a more stand­ard phpBB theme (the easy option, but loses the value that was added by the right side­bar)
    3. Ditch phpBB and replace it with a more stand­ards com­pli­ant BB like bbpress
    or two oth­ers I was recently was made aware of by the Web Stand­ards Group mail­ing list:
    Vanilla and PunBB

    The more I think about option 1, the less I like it. The CSS is the easy part, the dif­fi­cult part is get­ting phpBB to do what I want. And after my exper­i­ences I will not be using phpBB for any forum I cre­ate in the future. So why develop skills is some­thing I am unlikley need in the future?

    Option 2 is admit­ting defeat, but it does resolve most of the problems.

    Option 3, will des­troy the exis­it­ing data, but puts a more man­age­able solu­tion and I can develop new skills I may use later.

    I will talk it over with the people behind PDMBC and make a decision.

    If you are crazy enough to want to look at the code behind it, down­load the theme and the mod­i­fied phpBB files this is the pain­ful part, you have to hack the phpBB files, so the theme can include other PHP files.

  5. chovy Says:
    August 6th, 2006 at 7:18 am

    I too am tired of hack­ing up phpbb to get it to play with word­press and my other pages.

    I couldn’t find any excep­tional use of bbpress except the word­press for­ums, any others?

  6. panikeeer Says:
    November 25th, 2006 at 12:17 am

    I didnt find thing that i need… :-(
    [url=http://google.com]google[/url]

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