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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 12:12 pm and is filed under css and html, wordpress . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.