By crick on

For those of you wanting to make your drupal forum look more like phpBB. the solution is near. I call it phpBBtheme and this release beta 1 can be seen and downloaded at http://www.crickster.com

oh yeah, its designed for the 4.7 branch but may work on 4.6.x if you are using a phptemplate theme.

Comments

BoarK’s picture

BoarK commented

crick,

Just as I am about to attempt to change the theming of my forums, I see this. You may have saved me a chunk of my time. Thank you.

Nathan.

kuba.zygmunt’s picture

kuba.zygmunt commented

I did something which resembles phpbb forum.

Look at: http://globalizacja.kongresruchow.pl/

Its in Polish but I had to change CMS from Xoops to Drupal silently, so that's why it looks like a phpbb forum :)

(its another modification of Drupal :) heeyaaa :) )

kuba

BoarK’s picture

BoarK commented

Hi kubaZygmunt,

I am just wondering if your forum theme is released to the public and if so, then where can I download it.

Thanks.

Nathan.

crick’s picture

crick commented

I'm curious about the method you took to get your forum to look like that. Did you have to modify any of the drupal modules or did you do the drupalart.org/phpbb thing and then modify that?

bandika’s picture

bandika commented

I'v downloaded your work ant it works. Thank you!

bandika’s picture

bandika commented

yet, I have a (small) problem. I'v installed this theme for box grey theme, it works well with it but it's box cleanslate theme doesn't. Comments can't be viewed only in a new page without theme.
What sould I do? :(
Thanks.
A.

crick’s picture

crick commented

I just installed it on box_cleanslate. I think you probably forgot to call up the stylesheets. you have to put print forumstyle underneath print $styles in page.tpl.php

Libervisco’s picture

Libervisco commented

I've managed to get my forums to look like real decent forums using flatforum and some of the instructions from http://www.drupalart.org/phpbb (some things from there don't seem to work out very well on 4.7).

Here's how it looks now: http://www.nuxified.org/drupal/?q=forum

I am however looking to replace reply links with buttons and also add quote buttons that would, when clicked, open a reply window and put the text of the post in quote bbcode tags. I suppose that could be done using some javascript and without modifying any modules.

Ideas on that welcome. :) Oh and yeah I'm willing to share the final outcome.

Cheers
Daniel

crick’s picture

crick commented

yeah, I have decided to take a close look at the drupalart.org/phpbb way of doing things and try to merge that with what i have already done. After this week I will begin working on this some more and will have a complete package deal that includes buttons instead of text links in the posts.

The trick to getting buttons is to not use <?php print $links ?> but to use php to generate the link url and then simply give it a picture that users can click on (button)

If you would like to post your method of getting your site to look the way it does, I'm sure it would help.

I have big plans for this, It is my goal to provide an entire theme system for the forums. Currently I have the forum css files and images stored in ../themes/forum

I plan on somehow getting these css files to be called up by print $styles instead of my print $forumstyle that way nothing will need to be added to page.tpl.php.

I'd also plan on attempting to develop a forum theme module that would enable installing themes (like in phpBB, etc) and then switching between themes. The themes would be stored in ../themes/forum/..

I feel like this will be many months in the making as I don't know much about php programming. I plan on studying the way drupal's theme chooser works and build the module in a manner resembling that.

I plan to start development on monday of next week when I am done with these damn finals.

If anyone wants to help out with developing such a beast, your help is welcomed. I am but a college student who has become fascinated by drupal and php.

Libervisco’s picture

Libervisco commented

Some really great ideas there. It would be great to have something like this to make it possible to easily transform the looks of drupal forums to something more like phpbb.

I have now made those reply, edit and delete links to be buttons thanks to sime on IRC. I posted a solution here: http://drupal.org/node/33170#comment-116719

It is however a hack of the function in a comments.module. Maybe if you take a look at it you could make that into something that could be added in template.php or something like that, so that it doesn't require modifying comments.module.

Btw, the quotes link is actually provided by the quote module (http://drupal.org/project/quote). You just have to enable it and you've got the link. Then if you want to make it a button I think it should be possible by implementing the same kind of hack on quote.module as I did to comments.module (with help of sime). I am going to try that.

Good luck!

BoarK’s picture

BoarK commented

Hi,

I really like your forum layout. Can't believe it's drupal's forums. Regarding the addition of the quote button, I think it's best that you stick to javascript if you are planning to share the theme with the community. However, a small patch is all that is required if you want to go the module modification route. I'm willing to help either way if you're not up to coding it yourself.

Let me know.

Nathan.

crick’s picture

crick commented

Well, I don't plan on modifying any of drupal's existing modules, as currently I have not made any changes to any drupal modules. Changing the appearance is done entirely in the theme template files. When I spoke of modules earlier, I was saying that I plan to create a totally new module which would be available in the contributed modules section, that would allow users to switch between forum themes without making any changes to the sites main theme. I don't plan on patching any of drupal's modules, I want to provide a solution that will not bother drupal's core code, thus making drupal upgrades go smoothly.

I'm currently in a brainstorming state and havent begun any development of such a module as of this time, I want to let the idea float around in my head for a few days and see what other people think and from there we can try to go about this as logically as possible.

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented

Just clicked on the link to your site but couldn't see the beta - is this still available?

We're just in the process of transferring a fairly large phpbb forum over to drupal and this would help a lot with the theming. We'd like to contribute anything we manage to do back into a module if it's still happening as well