Theming phpBB

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jack_indigo
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Theming phpBB

Post by jack_indigo »

In the world of PHP-based forum systems, I've looked at them all. The players that stood out the strongest, and which had a community behind them, were phpBB, vBulletin, and Simple Machines Forums (SMF). Well, you have to pay for vBulletin if you want to use it on your for-profit website, so to me it came down to phpBB or SMF, and phpBB has the largest marketshare and is what people usually expect these days.

But darn if this isn't the most @#!@#$ thing to do: theming the phpBB forum system. It's got one third of its system in cache, another third in the database, and another third as regular files. So let's say you want to change a color, or swap and image, replace a section of content with something else, or insert a div of content before or after something else: you think you find where to do that, you make the change, and it's not reflected on the site. So you refresh cache in like two places in the admin system (the home page and the Styles\Themes\Edit Theme page), and the ###*@# thing isn't showing up on the screen! Augh!

The other thing I worry about is that if I theme this thing and get it just right: can I move it to a web host and it work just fine or will I have to start all over again? And can I export the entire theme? And what if I want to upgrade the forum, will the theme get in the way? I'm sure I'll find out that it doesn't run so smoothly.
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pickle
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Re: Theming phpBB

Post by pickle »

I believe there's a settting in the ACP where you can turn off theme caching.

The part of the theme that's put in the database are the *.cfg files. You can refresh them in the ACP as well. Generally though - you shouldn't need to update them constantly.

For the most part, everything is stored in regular files, unless you make a change to the theme in the ACP, then phpBB copies the changed configurations to it's database. The simple fix to that is to not make any changes to the theme in the ACP.

If you build the theme & not make any changes to it in the ACP - then it will remain packagable (sp?), as everything about the theme should be in the theme's folder.

Minor upgrades to the phpBB software will almost certainly NOT break your theme. In order to do that, the templating language would have to change & I don't think they did that even when moving from v2 to v3.
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
jack_indigo
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Re: Theming phpBB

Post by jack_indigo »

I'm on v3 and I didn't see in the Admin panel where I could disable theme caching.
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pickle
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Re: Theming phpBB

Post by pickle »

In the "General" Tab, under the "Server Configuration" heading, there's a "Load Settings" link. Set "Recompile stale style components" to "Yes".
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
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