Get the Look: Styling Your phpBB Forum
Okay, so you have your forum up and running. You even have a topic or two in your forum, but how does it look? In this tutorial, I am going to walk you through the process of installing a theme. It should be pointed out that phpBB hasn’t decided if these style effects are called themes or styles. It seems that when looking for one to download, you want a style, but once it is installed, it is a theme.
Find Your Style
The first step is to find a style or theme you feel is appropriate for your forum. Head over to http://www.phpbb3styles.net and click on the New Styles link near the top left of the page. Colors are rather easy to modify with CSS, but the overall layout isn’t. Click on the title of the style you want. Then click on the Download button.
Upload Your Style
Once the style is downloaded, you need to upload the style to your server. Open up FileZilla or whichever FTP client you prefer. Then navigate to your_forum/styles. You simply need to upload the style folder and all its contents to this directory. Remember, if your style downloaded as a zip, you will need to unzip the files.
Install Your Style
After your style is uploaded, head to your forum admin panel and click on the Styles tab. You should be able to see the style. Click the install link beside your newly uploaded style. If it asks where to store the style sheets, I like to choose File system so that I can download the style sheets and change them to my liking. Click the Submit button. Hopefully your style installed correctly and you are looking at a green box saying New Theme Added to Database. Simply click on Back to Previous Page. Your style should show as an installed theme. If you choose to activate it, your forum should have the new theme applied.
Modify to Your Liking
The theme is applied, and let’s say you dislike the header. If you use Firefox or IE, you can right click on the header image and select View Background Image. This will take you to a page with nothing but the header image showing. In the address bar of the browser it shows the file location as: /styles/your_style/theme/images/logo.jpg. Looks like a lot of stuff, but in reality it is quite simple to follow. That address means that the image is called logo.jpg and it is in the image folder, inside themes, inside your_style. With your FTP client you can navigate to that folder, download the image, and edit it with Photoshop. Don’t change the size, just the design. When you are done editing the file, simply replace the old one with the new one. You can replace any image in your forum in this manner. Just take care not to edit the file size.
