posted 16 years ago
For the most part, the source is the documentation in this area. You will need to roll up your sleeves and dig into it... but the source in this case is for the most part standard HTML, CSS with a little Freemarker (www.freemarker.org) scripting.
All the look and feel of jForum is done via Freemarker templates (and standard CSS/HTML). The "default" templates are located in the template/default directory. For each "page type" in jForum, there is a matching template file. These are mostly HTML with some simple script language included.
Note that all of these templates will include a the contents of the header.htm and bottom.htm. These are use to define the "wrapper" around the code generated pages.
FWIW, a quick low coding method of "skinning" would be to not worry about the templates, etc at first... but to just to display one or more jForum pages and do a "save as" from IE. This will create a pure HTML file that you can load into your favorite HTML editor (e.g. Dreamweaver, et al) and then just work on getting your look and feel by modifying the CSS and images.
Then back track this into the jforum site. This work fine as long as you keep to CSS and images. However, if you need to change the structure or add includes / events to tags, and the like, you will need to then start modifying the template files.
FYI, a "best practice" for templates is to copy the "default" template directory to a new directory (at the same level). Then change your forum config properties to use this new template. This lets you keep the original for reference and helps when the version changes, etc.
[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]