How to add a theme to your board

by **Shadow** March 7th 2008, 10:17 am

How to add a theme to your board.

PHPBB VERSION 2

There are a few ways to add a theme to your site. Firstly forumotion has a list of preset themes that you can find in "Admin Panel >> Display >> Choose a theme". You can select either the colours of the theme, or the images of the theme or both. It does this all automatically for you.

Secondly you will see when choosing a theme that there is a tab for www.hitskin.com a site in conjunction with forumotion that has a database of phpbb 2 and phpbb 3 themes. You can choose any of these and it will be added automatically to the site. Please read this tutorial on how to install hitskin themes properly.

Thirdly, you can manually add a theme. This is not easy for those with little HTML and CSS knowledge, so i firmly suggest creating a test board to practice on. I normally choose the standard subsilver theme from the choose a theme and install it on my test forum ready to begin.

Step 1.

Find a phpbb 2 theme you like from the many sites out there that offer themes. Google free phpbb themes. Download it to your computer.

Step 2.

Extract all files within the theme and search for the one that says its file type is a Cascading Style Sheet, The examples below are for the girltalk theme i use on my site. Open the Cascading Style Sheet and copy all the code within it.

Girltalk CSS

Spoiler:

Step 3.

In "Admin Panel >> Display >> Pictures & Colors >> Colors", you will see the tab for your CSS Stylesheet at present. Click it. The box for it is most likely empty. Paste your copied CSS code in the empty white box and save. Leave default style sheet to yes.

Step 4.

You now need to host the images that your pasted CSS needs.

body {
background-image: url(images/girTalk2_bg.gif);
background-repeat: repeat;
background-color: #E6F6F9;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
height: 100%;
scrollbar-face-color: #DEE3E7;
scrollbar-highlight-color: #FFFFFF;
scrollbar-shadow-color: #DEE3E7;
scrollbar-3dlight-color: #D1D7DC;
scrollbar-arrow-color: #EF6B6B;
scrollbar-track-color: #EFEFEF;
scrollbar-darkshadow-color: #98AAB1;

as you can see from the snippet of the CCS i am using as an example, the part in bold needs to be changed. It is only half a URL. You need to find the image within the theme folder (it will have the same tite as the end of the code, for example in my case the image would be saved in the theme folder under: girTalk2_bg) and save it to your computer, then upload the image to the likes of servimg, photobucket imageshack etc. You then need to replace the link in bold, with the direct URL to your hosted picture.

body {
background-image: url(https://2img.net/r/ihimg/7878/23/girTalk2_bg.gif);
background-repeat: repeat;
background-color: #E6F6F9;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
height: 100%;
scrollbar-face-color: #DEE3E7;
scrollbar-highlight-color: #FFFFFF;
scrollbar-shadow-color: #DEE3E7;
scrollbar-3dlight-color: #D1D7DC;
scrollbar-arrow-color: #EF6B6B;
scrollbar-track-color: #EFEFEF;
scrollbar-darkshadow-color: #98AAB1;

Step 5.

Work through your style sheet and theme folder saving images, hosting and changing URLs till they are all done. Then save. You can then preview your forum to see the changes. if your default themes headers etc are still present you need to go into modify the pictures and remove the URLS for them and save, as this will leave them empty and your CSS will take over.

Step 6.

You can then continue to use images from the unzipped theme files on your computer and hosting them, for the forum icons, buttons etc in "Admin Panel >> Display >> Pictures & Colors >> Pics Management". Its very time consuming.

One you have uploaded all the new images, that should be your theme installed on your forum.