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Theme I made for my website if anyone would like to see for inspiration.

jhayes88jhayes88 New
edited December 2018 in General Banter

Hi. I made some forums using vanilla and thought I'd show it off and brag. lol. I didn't see too many modern themes on this website, so I took a really basic one and changed almost literally everything, as well as had to fix a ton of issues with it. If you're not happy with the themes on this website, I suggest taking a basic theme and hacking away at it, since I believe you can get some really great looking sites using this forum software. Don't get me wrong, I don't even think I'm intermediate at web design or PHP development. I think I managed to get the basics down though lol.

Link: http://foxholeforums.com/

The forums are based on a game that I play. It's still a smaller game with a bit over 150,000 copies sold, which isn't bad, but probably not big enough to easily get a community with. I think as it grows, I'll have time to slowly add content and people might slooowly migrate over. The game developers work together in an actual work office and work on it full time. They release big updates like every month. It will definitely take longer than a few months to grow big enough to drive users to my site lol. I've advertised in all avenues I could think of(their subreddit, their official discord, their steam community page, all over twitch, submitted to google of course). All I got was 3 users to join. Part of why I made the forums were just to make something cool. Not looking to make any money with it. I'm sure it will grow over time. I've ran forums like a decade ago with thousands of members.

And yeah the theme of posts and individual comments on my forums change colors depending on user role. :)

Also, anyone hiring? lol jk. :(

Comments

  • R_JR_J Admin

    Only on mobile so I guess I cannot see most of the things you did. But on mobile category icons for subcategories destroy the layout

    And the dark blue links on the black messages are really hard to read for me

  • R_JR_J Admin

    Thanks for sharing! Just one more feedback, now that I'm opening the forum with a bigger monitor in front of me: the background picture behaves weird. My screen is larger than the picture and below the picture the original picture seems to scroll, sounds confusing I know...
    I guess that you have applied the background picture two times: once for the html body and you have set it to repeat and once for the vanilla content where it is fixed (or maybe also repeat but the content is not long enough).

    The colors remind me of steam, which I think is no coincidence :wink:
    Do you know that there is a plugin which allows users to log in with their steam account? In a forum like yours that would make sense, I guess.

    And coming back to what a starting point for a new theme could be: have you seen the discussion about the boilerplate for custom themes?

  • jhayes88jhayes88 New

    @R_J said:
    Thanks for sharing! Just one more feedback, now that I'm opening the forum with a bigger monitor in front of me: the background picture behaves weird. My screen is larger than the picture and below the picture the original picture seems to scroll, sounds confusing I know...
    I guess that you have applied the background picture two times: once for the html body and you have set it to repeat and once for the vanilla content where it is fixed (or maybe also repeat but the content is not long enough).

    The colors remind me of steam, which I think is no coincidence :wink:
    Do you know that there is a plugin which allows users to log in with their steam account? In a forum like yours that would make sense, I guess.

    And coming back to what a starting point for a new theme could be: have you seen the discussion about the boilerplate for custom themes?

    Hey thanks for the feedback. Yeah the mobile version is default at the moment. I plan on making a dark theme for it.

    And thanks for telling me about the background issue. I had no idea. I'll try and fix that today.

    Here's what it looks like on my end

    And as far as Steam, I just found a plugin for it on vanilla forums addons thats only like 2 years old. I'll install it later and see if I can get it to work. Thanks!

  • jhayes88jhayes88 New

    @R_J said:
    Only on mobile so I guess I cannot see most of the things you did. But on mobile category icons for subcategories destroy the layout

    And the dark blue links on the black messages are really hard to read for me

    Yeah on mobile i'll probably have to add in some custom css to get rid of all of that and fix those issues. It's on my to-do list.

  • whu606whu606 MVP

    I'd recommend this theme as a starting point for your mobile one:

    https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/minusbaseline-theme

    We use it on our site, and it works very well for mobile devices.

  • jhayes88jhayes88 New

    @whu606 said:
    I'd recommend this theme as a starting point for your mobile one:

    https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/minusbaseline-theme

    We use it on our site, and it works very well for mobile devices.

    Nice. Thanks for the tip. I'll have to try it out.

  • jhayes88jhayes88 New

    @R_J said:
    Thanks for sharing! Just one more feedback, now that I'm opening the forum with a bigger monitor in front of me: the background picture behaves weird. My screen is larger than the picture and below the picture the original picture seems to scroll, sounds confusing I know...
    I guess that you have applied the background picture two times: once for the html body and you have set it to repeat and once for the vanilla content where it is fixed (or maybe also repeat but the content is not long enough).

    The colors remind me of steam, which I think is no coincidence :wink:
    Do you know that there is a plugin which allows users to log in with their steam account? In a forum like yours that would make sense, I guess.

    And coming back to what a starting point for a new theme could be: have you seen the discussion about the boilerplate for custom themes?

    can you try it again on the computer you used and tell me if it looks okay on your screen now? I'm not quite sure what resolution you used :P

    Thanks

  • jhayes88jhayes88 New

    @R_J said:
    Only on mobile so I guess I cannot see most of the things you did. But on mobile category icons for subcategories destroy the layout

    And the dark blue links on the black messages are really hard to read for me

    I believe I fixed the mobile issue too. Still gonna try Whu606's suggestion for the other theme and see how that is.. I sorta like how the mobile theme is now though because I can tweak the colors to make it dark, and it already looks similar to the desktop version. We'll see.

  • mcu_hqmcu_hq ✭✭✭

    Looks really good. I'd suggest condensing the forum into just a few categories since most people will post in the general chat anyways and it makes it easy to follow.

  • kierankieran New

    I really like that, I am trying to build something similar. Thanks!

  • jhayes88jhayes88 New

    @kieran said:
    I really like that, I am trying to build something similar. Thanks!

    Thanks!! :):) And really? If you want me to give feedback feel free to message me on here or email me at jonathanhayes88@gmail.com (i'm active with that email). I'd love to see what it looks like and maybe give feedback.

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