Working with templates for this community

Hello everyone, I hope you are all well.

I am so pleased with this Dolphin software that I feel I should give something back in return, we are a poor group so financial contributions are not possible. I have been a template designer for phpBB2 & phpBB3 for three years now, but I have grown weary of the limitations of just forums. I am disabled you see so I spend a great deal of my time working with graphics, trouble is, I have no formal education at all, we were raised in state institutions you see and were denied schooling. I have only the roughest of coding skills and I find learning coding very hard, oh I do not suggest I am unable to learn, I just find learning very hard is all.

Anyway, I am very intrigued at the notion of making templates for this community for use with Dolphin, my templates would be free to access when they are ready. We cannot resource the funds for purchasing a license from boonex so the very notion of making people pay for my templates sours my mouth.

I have got to work on my first attempt, it was going quite well until I found a few things I was unable to change:

1) there is a background colour within the Dolpin etcetera link box at the footer that I am unable to change, how do I change this.

2) I have wrapped the site within a graphical border, but the border on appears on the index, when I navigate the site the border goes away, what do I need to do to make the border appear site-wide?

3) The border around the separate sections on the site, I seem unable to change the colours of this, I have checked the css file in both base and tmpl_uni, no luck, where do I need to go from here to change those?

4) There are some grey backgrounds with images that I don't seem able to find, you can see them on the demo image I have linked to below, how do I alter those?

5) Finally, when the template is complete, how do I best package it for people to access and install?

This is how it is looking so far (it is incomplete and will look more professional upon completion!)

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q72/Grumpy_075/abb94e3b.jpg

I would appreciate any help, many thanks my new friends, peace be yours Sisters and Brothers,

Reverend.K.Fitzgerald

RevKF. I can't help you with your request but, I looked at your example, it looks good. Please let me know when you are ready to post!

Stuart

I recommend you to install FF + firebug plugin to inspect any element styles, so all your question will vanished.

So you will able yourself determinate and place of CSS file and list of exactly styles. And you will able to change its in realtime.

5. About package program. Usually we use ZIP. It more popular format.

Hiya Stuart, yes of course I will et you know when it is available, no problem there at all.

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Hiya leesta, thank you for that information, explains that one, thanks.

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Hiya Andrey, yes, I have used FireFox for a long time now, I've used the web developer toolbar for quite some time now also but I was not aware of FireBug, excellent extra resource there, thank you. If only there were a method of determining which html file was being handled as well, that would be ideal. I know, I am asking for miracles in a World of imperfection, me being one of those imperfections I might add.

With regards to the packaging, I use WinRAR, this is something I did not make very clear, sorry, what I meant was, when we package the template do we follow a folder structure tree or simply create an archive to unpack into a single folder on the users PC.

I'm seeing that a lot of calls are crossing between base template as well as from the tmpl_uni template folders, can we not merge both to create a single encompassing template?

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I am still stuck with not being able to make the border graphics show anywhere outside of the main index page, anyone got any clues where I need to go from here?