Whenever i create a website, i like to try my best to create a consistent look and feel for the entire site as much as possible. If you change UI elements such as navigation links when you go to an installed web application on your site you WILL confuse your users.

That said, it isn’t always practical to shoehorn your entire main site design in to an application without downgrading that applications functionality. With phpBB for example, if I wanted to use the Iswapyou main site design I would need to have two navigation bars (the main site nav and phpBB’s nav) on every phpBB page. This would take up too much space on the page and introduce more clutter than i wanted to, so I instead put my iswapyou main sites navigation links into phpBB’s navigation bar.

I followed the example of Khurram Hussain Zuberi’s Simplified Header Links mod, but really, you don’t have to go through that and understand it all if you’re a decent php and/or html coder. All of the links for the default subsilver template are in templates/subSilver/overall_header.tpl of your phpBB install folder. You can open that and hard-code your links in there, or optionally create and use phpBB template variables if you like the code to look cleaner.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Code, HTML, community site building, php, phpBB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.