{"id":18694,"date":"2012-10-02T09:05:05","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T16:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/css-tricks.com\/?page_id=18694"},"modified":"2015-10-22T10:36:45","modified_gmt":"2015-10-22T17:36:45","slug":"132-intro-to-the-forums","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/lodge\/v10\/132-intro-to-the-forums\/","title":{"rendered":"#132: Intro to The Forums"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this screencast we dive into an all new section of the site: The Forums! This is a huge area of the site. Perhaps not so much in traffic (I&#8217;ve always wished it could grow, traffic wise), but certainly in user activity and UI complexity.<\/p>\n<p>The forums use <a href=\"http:\/\/vanillaforums.org\/\" rel=\"noopener\">Vanilla Forums<\/a> to power them. They are fairly good, but I do wish someday to move them to <a href=\"http:\/\/bbpress.org\/\" rel=\"noopener\">bbPress<\/a> to unify the entire site together. It&#8217;s certainly possible. The forums actually started life as phpBB!<\/p>\n<p>Theming Vanilla Forums bears some similar to WordPress. Each theme lives in a unique folder, so you don&#8217;t have to modify core files. In most ways it&#8217;s different though. Each file in the theme folder overrides a core file (just through it&#8217;s presence). It can get a little tricky in figuring out where to put what file.<\/p>\n<p>We duplicate the old CSS-Tricks theme so we have a new place to work. This way we can version control it and feel free to push changes and all that without effecting the live site. <\/p>\n<p>Ideally we&#8217;ll use as many shared resources as possible. Certainly &#8220;global&#8221; stuff (global.css) like typography and modules and grids and all that.<\/p>\n<p>Also we go over the help I had on this particular area of the site. I had <a href=\"http:\/\/theleggett.com\/\" rel=\"noopener\">David Leggett<\/a> (of UX Booth and more) do up some wireframes of what this redesign might be like and help make it as simple as possible. We&#8217;ll work directly from his wireframes as we move on in re-designing this area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this screencast we dive into an all new section of the site: The Forums! This is a huge area of the site. Perhaps not so much in traffic (I&#8217;ve always wished it could grow, traffic wise), but certainly in user activity and UI complexity. The forums use Vanilla Forums to power them. They are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":18010,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"lodge-video.php","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"sig_custom_text":"","sig_image_type":"featured-image","sig_custom_image":0,"sig_is_disabled":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"c2c_always_allow_admin_comments":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":18702,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/lodge\/v10\/136-understanding-vanilla-forums-theme-overrides\/","url_meta":{"origin":18694,"position":0},"title":"#136: Understanding Vanilla Forums Theme Overrides","date":"October 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"We left off trying to decide if we can win the battle for a static login form or not. We probably could, but in more playing around with the forums, we see that it's not just login that by default comes up in a modal. The modal design pattern is\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18698,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/lodge\/v10\/134-forums-wrangling-part-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":18694,"position":1},"title":"#134: Forums Wrangling, Part 2","date":"October 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"In this screencast we continue to dig into the code of Vanilla Forums and get our theme going. We make the decision right away to do the wild-n-crazy move of nuking the entire set of CSS that comes from Vanilla and has been tinkered with by me over the years\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18696,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/lodge\/v10\/133-forums-wrangling-part-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":18694,"position":2},"title":"#133: Forums Wrangling, Part 1","date":"October 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"In this screencast we'll actually dig into the code of the Forums area. The \"main\" file of the forums, if there is such a thing, is default.master.php. It's a bit like index.php in a WordPress theme, except literally every view in Vanilla uses it whereas some views in WordPress don't\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18708,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/lodge\/v10\/139-individual-forums-thread-styling\/","url_meta":{"origin":18694,"position":3},"title":"#139: Individual Forums Thread Styling","date":"October 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"You might argue that the homepage of the Forums is the most important page, but there are equally good arguments for individual thread views being the most important. Data suggests people land on these \"deep links\" in higher numbers than the homepage itself, even though the homepage is the most\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18704,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/lodge\/v10\/137-forums-wrangling-part-4-getting-control\/","url_meta":{"origin":18694,"position":4},"title":"#137: Forums Wrangling, Part 4, Getting Control","date":"October 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"We jump right into styling the main content area of the homepage of The Forums. Arguably the most important part of the forums, since it's the first thing people see when arriving to The Forums. This gives us the opportunity to override the core file that controls this as we\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 3 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":18714,"url":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/lodge\/v10\/142-forums-modules-styling\/","url_meta":{"origin":18694,"position":5},"title":"#142: Forums Modules Styling","date":"October 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Along the right side of the forums there are a series of modules. \"Modules\" visually, \"Modules\" literally in code, and \"Modules\" in that the content they contain is a related group, separate\/different from the content in other modules. The first one we look at is the Categories module. Vanilla Forums\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18694"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18694"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210004,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18694\/revisions\/210004"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/css-tricks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}