customise phpBB 2

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customise phpBB 2

wheres the doctype?

benihana

7:41 pm on Mar 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

Im trying to customise phpBB for the first time.

I thought the doctype would be a reasonable place to start :(

Ive done a search across all files created on install, but the only doctypes that show up are for pages like read me, coding standards etc.

anyone know where it might be? and if you know of guide to customising id me be appreciative (by sticky if nessecary)

Thanks

encyclo

8:04 pm on Mar 22, 2005 (gmt 0)

You'll find the template files in

template/[b]ThemeName[/b]

- the doctype is in the template file called

overall_header.tpl

. A few pages also use

simple_header.tpl

, so you should change it there too. If you're in to standards-compliance, the "natural" doctype for phpBB is XHTML 1.0 Transitional, as the internally-generated markup (ie. the markup not controlled by the templates) complies to that standard.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Unfortunately phpBB 2.0.x ships with a HTML 4.01 half-doctype, which is wrong.

benihana

8:57 am on Mar 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

thanks for replying encyclo.

id seen a few posts saying to look for those files, but they dont seem to be on my server :(

the forum was provided by my host - all i had to do was click a couple of buttons and it installed - dont know if this makes a difference?

Cheers

<added> OK. just looked at the files using the cpanel file manage, and overall_header is there, BUT when i look through ftp i cannot see it. or im going mad :( </added>

encyclo

2:51 pm on Mar 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

It's certainly strange that the files aren't showing when you connect via FTP: I suppose that the one-click install used by your hosting company might in some way have something to do with it - for example, they might have one set of files (which they keep up to date) and those files are used by everyone on the server (I know I'm clutching at straws here!).

If you're going to do some serious customization on the forum (and phpBB in general needs a lot of tweaking if you are trying to improve ranking and usability), then you're probably better-off installing the package manually. However, you would then need to manage updates and patches yourself.

benihana

12:57 pm on Mar 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

thanks encyclo.

i considered a manual install but security is not my forte.

it is a bit wierd that i cannot see them through ftp - i can see many template files, just not those two.

ive got the firendly urls mod working, but and am trying to make the whole board more accessible, which is a pretty huge job. :(