Dolphin 7 - how to change template without break Orca Forum /

Hello guys, this is my first time using Boonex Dolphin 7 and my first post talking about it. It's a pain for the newbies. It's kinda hard to figger it out and even harder when it comes to customization. It's just so much to talk about and so poor documentation.

I had the following experience: creating my customised layout, i noticed that everytime i changed it, my Orca Forum stopped working. Back to Uni template, everything went back to normal. Finally discovered why.

When you create a new template at Dolphin, you need to create a new layout for the Orca Forum, with the same name. Let's go through this step-by-step. I assume you do know how to create a template by now.

1. Via FTP or CPanel File Manager, reach out this path: your_site/modules/boonex/forum/layout and there, make a copy the folder named Uni and rename it with your template's name, my template is called jenniferpayne.

2. Inside the folder you named (jenniferpayne) for me, open on a text editor like notepad, eclipse or any other the file called params.php .

There you'll see these lines:


$gConf['dir']['xsl'] = $gConf['dir']['layouts'] . 'uni/xsl/'; // xsl dir
$gConf['url']['css'] = $gConf['url']['layouts'] . 'uni/css/'; // css url
$gConf['url']['xsl'] = $gConf['url']['layouts'] . 'uni/xsl/'; // xsl url

Replace the "uni" with your templates name and you'll have something like this:

$gConf['dir']['xsl'] = $gConf['dir']['layouts'] . 'jenniferpayne/xsl/'; // xsl dir
$gConf['url']['css'] = $gConf['url']['layouts'] . 'jenniferpayne/css/'; // css url
$gConf['url']['xsl'] = $gConf['url']['layouts'] . 'jenniferpayne/xsl/'; // xsl url

3. save the file, send it back to your server and we're almost done.

When you do this, you'll notice some brackets [[ ]] around some texts, it happens because if you change any file from Orca, layout, Language files, it needs to be recompiled. So, go to Manage Forum link, click at "[[Compile Language]]" or something like this. Click on it and it's done.

This is my first post in English, i'm a web designer teacher, my resume is at www.jenniferpayne.com.br <--- Still translating my site, but basically Joomla, web design Teacher, do also some 3D applications.

You'll find some useful information about Dolphin, Joomla, Wordpress, other CMS's and stuffs related to the web world.

follow me at twitter @JennyPayneDZN

Next time, i'll teach the noobs how to create their own template and some tricks to work with Dolphin CORE Generated HTML and CSS.

That's all.