phantom of the black parade
pronounsshe / her pronouns
4,238written posts
offlinecurrently
at this, the world's end, do we cast off tomorrow~!
So I literally don't have to give a damn about anything other than the <!--|thingies|--> and <% whatsits %>? Everything else I can just code myself in code pen and then insert those things where they need to go? Okay, so then the way boards on forums are set up, layouts and looks, etc, is that all just css then? i passed out almost immediately after replying last night asdfjkl;
to answer the question, yes and no.
for the heavy lifting? yes, you're largely just coding the html + css elements for about 95% of the visuals, so you can literally design the lion's share of your basic site layout (background/navbars, headers/footers/sidebars, etc) via the board wrappers; the category/board lists + board stats area, subboard/thread lists, the thread/post/miniprofile layout, the profile layout, and the member list via the html templates, and any additional webpages via the webpages. all the css gets chucked in the stylesheets, largely at the end, and you just replace your placeholders with the <!-- |ELEMENT| --> things to call up, say, the poster's name or group id number.
but that being said? there are certain elements of the skin that it's easier to leave alone (like the wrapper + inner-wrapper classes) and others that you can only get at via either editing the css in the stylesheets after inspecting the element (like the pagination) and/or using an indirect workaround such as the macros (like for your "locked/closed/pinned" buttons or if you wanna use the post icons as "warning tags" or the like) or extensive javascript coding (like the recent topics clip). because of that, i pretty highly recommend actually going through the html templates wiki page slowly to figure out 1) which html template corresponds to which area and 2) what options you actually have to tap in different html templates (like the post layout will not pull a parent account id, if you use it for a pm link, but a miniprofile layout will).
(which, as an aside. <!-- |ELEMENT| --> seems to correspond to smaller and/or less complex "fields" to call, like a profile number or avatar url, while <% ELEMENT %> seems to correspond to larger and/or more complex coding elements, like the entire shoutbox or a different html template. so, for example, while you won't need to use, say, <!-- |cat_id| --> for a category layout to work, if you don't add the <% FORUM_ROWS %> to the category header template, you'll not actually get any functioning boards, just the very top category header/footer.)
jumping down to the different board layouts for different boards/categories... i think there's been more than a few times that's been asked, so i'll just link to this thread here since it's functionally the same question and has the same answer (and i think i also linked to other times that the question has been asked as well and i remember leap explained it really well one time, i just do not remember where whoops-)
but also yes von is right for. the way the html templates would work, you'd be putting in every single custom board html into the html layout and then having to individually target it via the css so. for example, if you have 3 different basic html layouts for boards, every time a single board is being loaded, it's having to load all 3 of those layouts and just not display one, so. if you have a lot of boards on + a lot of layouts, you can potentially start making lower-end computers/phones chug a bit to load your index. so. something to keep in mind please, for the rpers who can't always afford powerful specs on their hardware.
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