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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
November 25th, 2006 at 12:17 am
I didnt find thing that i need… :-(
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