phpBB templates
Helping set up a web site for the Peel District Mountain Bike Club, which is going to be a WordPress blog, because it is easy for me to set up, and real easy for the four or so people who will be creating content to use. The difficult choice was picking a template to use with a little customisation. I ended up picking the very popular theme Connections even if it uses pixels as the unit of measurement, because it looks so good out of the box.
The club also wanted a forum, I thought about using Drupal for both the website and forum, but not wanting to have to learn Drupal from scratch, I chose phpBB, easy to install and getting running with a heap of templates to choose from. Everything was running smoothly until it came time to customise the forum and website to look seamless. Every phpBB template I looked at was table based. Which is a problem for me, because:
- The only time I have used tables for layouts in the last three years, was to convert a prototype I built with css to tables at the demand of the developer. It took me sixes times longer to convert the webpages to tables than it took to build the prototype.
- So much of the presentation is in each of the 40 odd template files, which means every minor change may need to be repeated in 40 odd TPL files instead of one CSS file
As this project is a favour for some friends, I had no intention of spending considerable time working out how phpBB is built and then spending more time doing changes just to do some simple customising. Fortunately I finally found a CSS based phpBB template. Sure it is quite different from what I had in mind and will require more work than I hoped, but at least I do not have to spend hours working with tables and changing 40 odd files.
February 17th, 2006 at 5:47 am
See you didn’t ask. I know I don’t know nothin’ ’bout ‘nothin, but I’ve used phpBB. We looked at it for the shreps portal, and the design was all tables all the time. Hope you’re feeling better soon,