358 CHAPTER 12 STYLING (Web hosting domain) PHPBB an aSilver.cfg
358 CHAPTER 12 STYLING PHPBB an aSilver.cfg file. Do not rename subSilver.css to anything else! Go ahead and make aSilver the default style so you can see your changes as they happen. (See the Installing and Using Themes section for more details on installing themes to your phpBB board and setting the default style.) Now it s time to consider some strategies for managing style customizations. Considering Styling Customization Approaches You can take a couple different approaches to handling styling customizations in phpBB. You can provide a static style sheet in a separate .css file. This approach is generally good if you are going for site integration. It does not permit you to make changes to colors and fonts using the Styles Administration panel, however. If you are looking to possibly release your template, you ll want to keep the subSilver method of adding styles to the board intact. subSilver places the contents of its style sheet in the overall_header.tplfile, complete with references to appropriate template variables for the theme, which permit you to use the Administration panel to change some colors and fonts. Go ahead and crack open overall_header.tpl in your copy of subSilver. The first thing you will likely notice is the large amount of CSS representing all the styles that control sub- Silver s layout. This CSS is controlled via the Administration panel. If you remove this CSS, you will lose that control. For site integration projects, removing the embedded CSS is perfectly fine, unless you wish to support multiple color themes. Otherwise, you ll want to customize the embedded CSS accordingly. Having a static style sheet generally reduces bandwidth usage. While smaller sites may not have problems with high-bandwidth usage, busier sites will likely prefer the static style sheet, which can be cached in the browser, so it is not downloaded with each page visit. If you are doing a site integration project, you should take another step and create your own style sheet and use the
HTML tag to link it to your page in overall_header.tpl. This way, you can style everything from scratch. If you wish, you can stick with the built-in subSilver identifiers, or you can take a harder, but more powerful, route and rip out subSilver s CSS definitions and replace them with your own. This is the route I almost always take. While it is a lot more work to replace the subSilver CSS definitions with your own, the control you get is unparalleled. Again, regardless of which path you take, do not delete the subSilver.cssfile! phpBB permits you to theme the Administration panel along with the rest of the site. This is fine, but removing the CSS file without altering any of the definitions can have incredibly strange consequences. If you decide to use a separate style sheet, make sure you don t disturb any of the theme settings in the Administration panel, as subSilver is perfectly fine for your behind-the-scenes work. Removing these values will cause the Administration panel to go haywire and become completely illegible (think black screens and one-pixel fonts, seriously!). If you are sticking with the subSilver definitions and theme-controlled colors, feel free to change those. You will notice that the Administration panel undergoes some changes as you do this; this is perfectly normal, as you re altering the settings for your theme in its entirety. Caution Under no circumstances should you delete the subSilver.css file!
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