Ability to change how output looks when rendering the catagories

MrCaspan · February 2020

I was wondering if there was a way to modify the way the core system shows categories. For instance I want to change it so that there is different HTML that is spit out by the system that shows each category. I know I would need to modify core files and this would break the system but there are some things like unread posts in a category that is not currently exposed to me to use.

I am assuming there is a template that the system uses for spitting out each category etc?

MrCaspan · February 2020

Let me be more precise, I want to add an image if there are unread posts and a different image it no now posts in that category . I know there is the NEW icon but its hard to see really quickly when browsing the forum and i want to make it a little more black and white.

So I was wondering where the template for rendering the Category page is...

R_J · February 2020

Never change existing files!

Vanilla can be modified mostly completely without changing files, just by adding files. To answer your question: you can use view overrides. You would need to create a theme and then create a file in a folder that is the same name like the view that you want to override. I'm not 100% sure which view you are talking about. Otherwise I could be more specific.

But what you are talking about sounds like a task for CSS. If I inspect e.g. https://open.vanillaforums.com/categories I see the following html

<li id="Category_27" class="Item Alt Category-blog Item-Category-blog Depth2 Depth-2 Archived Unread Rank-Vanilla Offline">

The body id of the page is #vanilla_categories_index. If you go down to where the line is where you would like to change something, you might come up with something like this:

#vanilla_categories_index .CategoryList .Unread .ItemContent.Category .Title::before {
 content: "💡";
 margin-right:1em;
}

With that you could use e.g. the Pockets plugin to insert your individual CSS

Bleistivt · February 2020

If all you want to do is display a different icon when a category is unread, you could also use this plugin of mine which adds a UI for that:

https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/categoryunreadphoto-plugin

MrCaspan · February 2020

How did i miss this plugin!!! This is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you very much @Bleistivt, simple, integrated and it works!

Ability to change how output looks when rendering the catagories

Comments