Post by Brian on Sept 24, 2014 12:18:02 GMT -8
Hi, everyone.
This is just a heads up to any theme creators and administrators to establish a few previously unwritten ground rules we've always enforced when it comes to creating and modifying themes, as well as tips to making your theme have the utmost compatibility with plugins submitted to the library and other codes.
When creating or editing a theme, you are required to abide by the following list of restrictions when making your changes. You have free reign over anything not listed in the following two sections (so long as it doesn't violate any other rules). This list is subject to change depending on the addition of new features or changes to our policies or service.
Also, please try to respect any credits or copyrights the theme author has placed on their theme. You're free to edit themes installed on your forum to your liking, but removing the credit to the author is disrespectful to their work.
Allowed Edits
- Changing the horizontal alignment of the banner advertisements
- Changing any aspect of the PBN bar (as of this update)
Forbidden Edits
- Removing/hiding ProBoards advertisements through methods other than the purchase of ad-free, obscuring them from view, or changing the properties of the actual advertisements themselves
- Removing or hiding any of the footer links (Terms of Service, Privacy, etc.)
- Removing anything listed under Upgrades > Ad-Free > Settings through the use of your theme modifications
Compatibility
There are a few easy ways to ensure that changes to your theme's design do not interfere with the functions of the forum. This also helps make more plugins compatible with your theme as the majority of plugin authors design their plugins on the default ProBoards theme that shows when first creating a theme.
Ease of Use
This is just a heads up to any theme creators and administrators to establish a few previously unwritten ground rules we've always enforced when it comes to creating and modifying themes, as well as tips to making your theme have the utmost compatibility with plugins submitted to the library and other codes.
When creating or editing a theme, you are required to abide by the following list of restrictions when making your changes. You have free reign over anything not listed in the following two sections (so long as it doesn't violate any other rules). This list is subject to change depending on the addition of new features or changes to our policies or service.
Also, please try to respect any credits or copyrights the theme author has placed on their theme. You're free to edit themes installed on your forum to your liking, but removing the credit to the author is disrespectful to their work.
Allowed Edits
- Changing the horizontal alignment of the banner advertisements
- Changing any aspect of the PBN bar (as of this update)
Forbidden Edits
- Removing/hiding ProBoards advertisements through methods other than the purchase of ad-free, obscuring them from view, or changing the properties of the actual advertisements themselves
- Removing or hiding any of the footer links (Terms of Service, Privacy, etc.)
- Removing anything listed under Upgrades > Ad-Free > Settings through the use of your theme modifications
Compatibility
There are a few easy ways to ensure that changes to your theme's design do not interfere with the functions of the forum. This also helps make more plugins compatible with your theme as the majority of plugin authors design their plugins on the default ProBoards theme that shows when first creating a theme.
- Try to maintain the overall structure of the default theme's HTML. You can swap out many HTML elements for others, but it's important to try and keep any classes or IDs that came with them intact in the template as both the forum's Javascript and many plugins submitted to the library are dependent on their consistency.
- If an element has a class or ID and you want to change how it displays, consider editing the CSS for that class or ID in your theme's style sheet or appending new CSS to the end of the style sheet rather than changing the class of the element itself.
- Do NOT add any HTML before the <!DOCTYPE HTML> tag or after the closing </body> and </html> tags in the Forum Wrapper template. Doing so is invalid HTML.
Ease of Use
- Consider placing any new CSS you need to add at the end of your style sheet. This not only makes it easier to find and edit but in most cases CSS declared later in the style sheet will override any CSS declared earlier, saving you the trouble of having to remember which line out of the 1,500+ present by default you needed to edit.
- There are many cases where they may be a necessity to use, but try to refrain from using inline styles in your layout template HTML (the style attribute -- ex: <div style="font-size: 12px;">). It increases the size of the template drastically and makes it difficult for even those most proficient in web design to decipher and debug. Consider using classes instead, then adding their CSS to the style sheet.
- Do not use <style> tags inside your layout templates. CSS only needs to be declared once per page for it to affect all elements that match its selectors. When it's in the mini-profile template, list templates, or any of the templates that repeat multiple times on a single page it's declared over and over again. CSS works most efficiently when limited to the style sheet. If you must use CSS in your templates try to keep the majority of it between the <head> and </head> tags of the Forum Wrapper layout template as anything you place there loads on every page.
- Comments are a fantastic way to keep track of and organize your work, as well as temporarily hiding code you don't want to display on the page but may want to show again later. For reference:<!-- This is an HTML comment. It is visible in the page's source but cannot be seen on the actual page. -->/* This is a CSS comment. You'll find a lot of these in the style sheet. If you need to organize your CSS into sections this is a great way to do it. */