How do I make icons for Catagories?

dickbutt

So I have vanilla installed on http://ieatthings.com and it's working great so far.

however, i was wondering if it was at all possible to change the 'categories' field from text, to small rectangular icons, similar to something like this http://forums.somethingawful.com/.

notice those icons on the left next to the subforums? I'd like icons to appear instead of say "general [public]" or "scwvd [public]" both on the right of my threads and on the right hand side of the forum under "categories".

is this possible? if so, let me know!

Mark

I see you've set up a custom theme already. You should be able to get yourself going by changing the theme file for the categories module.

Copy /applications/vanilla/views/modules/categories.php to /themes/your_theme_name/views/modules/categories.php

Then edit the contents however you like. One nice way would be to do it with CSS. You can give the containing LI a class name based on the category url stub. Here's how I'd do it (just the top 19 lines of the file quoted here):

<?php if (!defined('APPLICATION')) exit();
$CountDiscussions = 0;
$CategoryID = isset($this->_Sender->CategoryID) ? $this->_Sender->CategoryID : '';

if ($this->_CategoryData !== FALSE) {
   foreach ($this->_CategoryData->Result() as $Category) {
      $CountDiscussions = $CountDiscussions + $Category->CountDiscussions;
   }
   $CssClass = $Category->UrlCode;
   ?>
<div class="Box">
   <h4><?php echo T('Categories'); ?></h4>
   <ul class="PanelInfo">
      <li class="<?php
      echo $CssClass;
      if (!is_numeric($CategoryID))
         echo ' Active';

      ?>"><strong><?php echo Anchor(Gdn_Format::Text(T('All Discussions')), '/discussions'); ?></strong> <?php echo $CountDiscussions; ?></li>

Then, of course, you'd need to add css to your theme so that it knows what image to load under each category.