Theming phpBB
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:41 am
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.
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.