How to Customize the Default phpBB Template?

PhpBB, or the bulletin board in the PHP scripting language, is among the most common ways of getting a forum online. Usually the templates are fairly clean and highly intuitive. However, you may wish to customize your forum to suit your brand or the purpose of the platform you are creating.

You may also wish to include a forum as part of your website, and the template may need to have a similar look and feel. The good thing is that you don’t need to be a PHP whiz in order to make aesthetic changes. As the BB or forum files are stored separately (not part of the main code), you don’t need any knowledge of how the forum works in order to customize it.

Among the main advantages of phpBB are:

• It is installable on most servers, including chrome, Firefox and IE.
• It is open source and, therefore, free

phpBB can be easily downloaded and installed on any PHP-enabled Web server using FTP and a browser. It just requires Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), a relational database management system (RDBMS) and php (server-side scripting language). Among RDBMS, any one of the following databases can be chosen:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• MS SQL
• MS Access via ODBC

phpBB enables you to set up an unlimited number of forums and categories. You can create users, moderators and user groups with varying permissions.

Customizing the Default phpBB Template in Six Easy Steps

1. FTP into your site: When you connect to your hosting space using FTP, you will be prompted for your username and password. After entering them, you are taken to the area where your files are held.
2. Locate the current default template: In the forum’s main directory, locate the current template in the subfolder /Templates/subSilver. The name of the default template is subSilver and it resides in the subfolder ‘Template’ of the forum’s main directory.
3. Edit Colors and Themes: You can change the colors and the themes of your forum by making changes in the template’s style file, which is by default called subSilver.css.
4. Edit Headers and Footers: Headers and footers contain all the code that wraps around your PHP generated forum. You can edit them to make significant changes in the appearance of your page. For editing headers, make amendments in the file named overall_header.tpl and for footer do changes in the overall_footer.tpl file.
5. Edit Button Configurations: You can find all the images that have been used in the template, in the images subfolder of the template directory. If you overwrite them, you do not need to change the location. However, if you wish to have different file names or locations, edit subSilver.cfg pointing to the appropriate location.
6. Individual Pages: Although the configuration and header/footer settings would be applicable to all the pages, you have the option of customizing the layout of individual pages. Each .tpl file in the template directory corresponds to an individual page. For example, aboutus_body.tpl is the template for the About Us page, and support_body.tpl is the template for the Support page.

But for those who would rather use already made templates for phpBB, you can find many styles for free here.