custom user themes for boards.ie

00sully

I just read an old thread from 2005 with people looking for new themes.

for the past while, I've been running a grease monkey script that allows me to theme boards.ie anyway I want by adding my own custom css and javascript.

very handy in work as I have it completely plain white with most images hidden (except those I need like quick reply button etc...)

My question is should or even am I allowed to make this available for others to do the same? heres a screenshot of the boards homepage - admittedly I've hidden the google search box on the main page to widen the new posts view - prob shouldn't admit to that one!

this script will give people the power to do more to the site than look and feel. even hiding posts be certain users etc...(which could be useful!)

cheers,

sul.

Conor

Moved to Site Development.


By all means, make this available to others. Thanks for taking the time to develop this!

Ross

Cool! Fair play.

Slippin Jimmy

Thanks. Sounds interesting. Would like to be kept up to speed on this.

00sully

ok so I have the first script up and running. This is the plain white version I use for browsing boards in work :-o

1. Install greasemonkey firefox addon (restart ffox) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
2. Navigate to http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/66010 and install the script

boards will now have the appearance as defined in the script. You can take this script, store it locally and play around with the css. All the override css rules are created inline in the script.

I have my css file stored on my pc and any edits I make to it immediately appear on boards One caveat though, you cannot (or rather I haven't figured out yet!) keep the custom css file locally on your pc - it must be on a server so I host it locally on my wamp virtual server. IIS would do the trick too.

This is due I'm sure to the @import function in css not being able to read local file paths - anyone know anything more about this the let me know!? I've commented out the line that imports my custom css from my localhost so its easily configured.

If you copy the script and make changes you need to uninstall it and re-install through greasemonkey in order for the changes to take effect! It's a pretty simple script so shouldn't pose a problem to anyone even novices In order to view the css classes you may want to override, I would recommend installing the web developer toolbar for firefox and you can then inspect any element on the page with your mouse cursor - you can get this here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

oh and one more thing, if you right click the greasemonkey icon in firefox status bar, click manage user scripts, you can add other pages that will use the same css - I added http://forum.xda-developers.com/* since this uses most of the same css rules as boards. This will only work with the same forum system that boards uses (think it is vBulletin?!?)

Darragh

Nice work - I can see myself using this!

00sully, is it okay with you if I link to this thread on the Boards.ie blog (http://blog.boards.ie)?

Cheers

Darragh

Mr Magnolia

That's very cool. Thanks for sharing 00sully. Quick one, once everything's imposted and I'm viewing boards via the custom css how do you switch back to the boards theme? Can this be done easily?

00sully

Darragh work away

Mr Magnolia, when you install greasemonkey - a little monkey icon appears down the bottom right of the firefox taskbar - a quick right click on this and you can disable the script (called custom boards.ie) - refresh boards.ie and you are back to the normal view!

The script is really just a quick way of replacing the boards.ie css - so if you dive into the css of the site (and test it by changing it on the fly with tools like web dev toolbar) you can really make some aesthetic changes to how the site looks its pretty cool (greasemonkey that is!!) it's also worthwhile learning a little about css for those who are new to it - it's easy too

go a little more advanced and you can remove page elements, re-size areas (eg. you could resize the quick reply text area to make it a little bigger)

god bless firefox