Nothing but the forum categories?

Do you think it would be in the realm of possibilities to have an entirely blank page, so the removal of statistics, groups, navigation bar all that stuff gone so you essentially had a blank page, with just your categories showing?

Not sure exactly what you mean by that but I think 'hiding' them stuff via CSS is fairly easy and possible.

Something like this, @Derri ?

http://forumbeta.forumactif.com/


It can be done with Template editing or JavaScript. It depends on the version, but I'd recommend template editing + css. It's what I used for the above example.

Yes Ange that's what I was meaning,

Something like that would be excellent and doing it via template editing probably would be best.

I kind of have a vision of creating a forum where the categories are in the center of the forum and various things that are needed for navigation are in widgets along the side and in the footer area.

Then for the background various words are placed around the categories, so the design would be very basic.

Its early days and I'm just in thought process.

It's a pretty simple modification. The only thing is it's the first time I've ever done this, so there could be little bugs I'm not aware of.

Firstly, this is some CSS that you can add to your sheet :

Code:

.index_menu {
  background:#FFF;
  padding-top:30px;
  padding-right:200px;
  position:fixed;
  top:0;
  left:0;
  right:0;
  bottom:0;
}
#right {
  position:relative;
  z-index:1;
}

This fixes the categories to the screen and hides everything else... actually, I think ads might show through, which is something I should think about. Anyway, the last rule is for the right widget column, this makes sure that the widgets show above the index_menu. It should be visible here now.


I think this modification can be applied to any version, but the version of my test forum was punbb. Go to the Templates > general > index_body

Find this variable :

Code:

{BOARD_INDEX}

and wrap it with these tags :

Code:

<div class="index_menu">{BOARD_INDEX}</div>

Then publish the template.

I think this way is nice and simple, otherwise you'd have to edit multiple templates to delete, or hide their contents while on the index.

Thanks Ange, I'll give that try.

You're welcome

If there's anything wonky, or you want to change something, let me know.