Styles



phpBB 3.0 is very customisable. Styling is one aspect of this customisability. Being able to manage the styles your board uses is important in keeping an interesting board. Your board's style may even reflect the purpose of your board. Styles allows you to manage all the styles available on your board.

phpBB 3.0 styles have three main parts: templates, themes, and imagesets.

Templates

Templates are the HTML files responsible for the layout of the style.

Themes

Themes are a combination of colour schemes and images that define the basic look of your forum.

Imagesets

Imagesets are groups of images that are used throughout your board. Imagesets are comprised of all of the non-style specific images used by your board.

Figure 3.8. Styles overview

Styles overview

This is a list of the styles that are installed on the board and the styles that can be installed on the board. You can see the number of users using the style and you can follow the links to change the style's details.

Creating a style is not an easy task and it takes quite a lot of time. Skilled designers from the phpBB community create styles that are available publicly and anyone can download them. This is a good place to start if you want to download and install a new style and you cannot afford to create your own, for any possible reason. The first place where you should stop is the Styles section on phpBB.com, you will find a list of useful links for places like the:

Styles Demo

The styles demo allows you to display each style on a live forum and see how each part of the board looks like using the specified style. You can browse through the styles until you find one that suits you and/or your board. The styles demo provides links to download the style and see its entry in the styles database.

Styles Database

The Style Database contains all the styles that were validated by the phpBB.com Styles Team. All styles are validated to ensure they are safe to use, work correctly and do not have any other caveats. You can filter styles by parameters like version, color or category to easily find a style that you would like. Each style entry in the database contains a link to the Style Demo, to show a live example of the style in use.