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A Little Advice Needed Please

edited December 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
Hi I just installed my Vanilla forum today without any problems and its all great so far but I was wondering about how to integrate it more with the style of my website. I've had a look though some of the themes and styles available to download but none of them really suit my website so I would like to know how to alter the design myself. I read some of the FAQ and readme files and I understand that the stylesheet needs to be edited but i'm very new to web design and i'm not familiar with editing lines of code. I'm using dreamweaver at the moment. Is there a way of displaying my forum in dreamweaver and changing it with a more user friendly layout of images and boxes and colours etc?

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    First, you have to read the the docs related to themes editing and style editing. Maybe you'll need only css changes (style), but maybe html changes too (theme).

    Now how to test and push the changes to your site?

    Straightforward (but not quite recommended):
    If your live install is still in the test phase, and if you have a good connection, you could directly make the changes on the server with an editor that has ftp support (Dreamweaver has I think).

    The wise way (but quite techie):
    Install a local webserver (I personaly use xampp), and install Vanilla for your server to run. Now you can edit the files on your computer and see how it render in an instant.
    Then when you're satisfied by your work, push the changes on the live install (copy the new theme and select it).

    Maybe people here have other ideas...
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    I would just add that firebug is a nice add-on for firefox which enables to alter CSS and even HTML and Javascript on a currently viewed page.
    Any adjustment in CSS/HTML is rendered instantly.
    Anyway changes are not saved - if you refresh the page, changes are lost.
    It is good for shortening the process of final CSS changes so you don't have to save changes and upload them to the server, you can just try it in firebug and if you think the change is ok to be saved, you do the change in a source file and upload it to the server.
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