Other than the Eve Owner's Guide, is there any documentation covering customization? I can find my way around replacing the icons and such, but am a little less sure how to restructure the forum page layouts, include banner and sidebar content, etc. I can do the HTML, but am just not sure about the Groupee/Eve customizations.

The Style editing screens range from very useful to less than that.

For instance, the Layout and Colors page has a labels, "Page Width", "Container Color", "Topic Starter Column Width", the meanings of which aren't clear.

For instance, does "Background Color" show up only behind the content within "Page Width"? What exactly does the "Container Color" color? What is the "Topic Starter Column" and where is it documented?

Thanks.

Hi, again!

Anything that isn't covered in the owner's guide can usually be found by searching these forums. Users are more than happy to share their knowledge about layout.

For example, this thread is about adding banners:

http://community.groupee.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2311048/m/898108766
63/r/23310707663#23310707663

The question about the color is best solved with trial and error. Each little bit has its own control, but there is no existing documentation that provides a description or screenshot of those bits.

This is where the hidden forum I described earlier will come in handy.

From a little testing, I found out the following:

1) The background color shows up behind the forum content, whose size is controlled by "Page Width."

2) The container color is applied to the top and bottom bars that "contain" the rest of the forum content. The top bar includes the Go, New, Find, Notify, Tools, and Admin tabs.

3) The "Topic Starter Column" is part of the forum layout. It's labled at the top of the forum as "Topic Starter" and contains the name of the person that started the original topic.

I didn't know the answers to these questions before you asked them. I created a hidden forum, made a new style, and played around with the settings until I got my answer.

One easy way is to have two windows with two forums with your original style and the test style side by side. Then, change something in the test file, refresh the page, and see what's changed.

If you want to see what part of your forum a color setting controls, the easiest way is to change the value to a color you don't normally use. That way, it stands out in stark contrast to the rest of your forum.

I happened to notice the name of the column, but another way you can test is to radically change the column width and see where the change occurs.

Thanks for your help and taking the time to identify all those elements I asked about.

If Eve would implement a Wiki, we could easily start community-driven documentation for customization. I installed MediaWiki recently and found the whole process to be quite painless. Then, instead of hunting around for threads to gather up customization nuggets, we could just add notes to the Wiki.

quote:

One easy way is to have two windows with two forums with your original style and the test style side by side. Then, change something in the test file, refresh the page, and see what's changed.

That's a good idea.

Thanks again!

Jack

This message has been edited. Last edited by: jackfrosch,

quote:

I can find my way around replacing the icons and such...

Well, how does one replace or add icons (ok, 'graemlins')?

-Steve

Icons and Graemlins are technically two different things.

Usually, the term "Icon" refer to one of the images located in your style settings:

Eve Control Panel > Display > Settings > (Name of Style) > Edit > Images

Eve's Graemlins translate keystrokes into images.

You can access your Custom Graemlin Settings from the eve control panel, independant of your style settings:

Eve > Display > Custom Graemlins

In both cases, you are asked to supply a URL to the image in question, the image has to already be accessable from the Internet.