Layperson's experience with Xenforo styling

[Ingenious]

Having been blown away by a test conversion of a vB3.8 forum that worked perfectly, I thought I'd take a look at the styling options in Xenforo. I did this very reluctantly, I hate trying to style forums with a vengeance

But instead of seeing some complex series of options, or a list of CSS files to edit, there in front of me was every major part of the forum, split into sections, each with its own page to mess about with the settings.

However this is what was amazing: An undo button, and a reset button (to get back to defaults in each section if it goes Pete Tong).

I made my forum fixed width in about, er, 30 seconds. Changed the global fonts in the same time. Adding a background image to the header, the main page, and a new logo took about 5 minutes and that included 4 minutes to make a cup of coffee.

One bit that I got stuck on was answered here in the forum in a very short time.

I know this is asked a lot here: "Is it easy to change the look and style of Xenforo?". The answer is yes, and if I can do it, anyone can.

You can even change the look and colour of the alert bubble so it stands out against your header!

This software just keeps getting better and better

 

[Divvens]

I had never, ever designed a forum theme before. I'm bad with css and html, I only do the graphical part of designing (psd's). But with xenforo it was really easy, everything is made easy and as you said, if something goes wrong a 'reset' button is always present!

Hopefully, I can learn to make better xenforo themes for my forums! Kudos to Mike and Kier for making it so easy for us to style our xf boards!

 

[Ingenious]

I've been playing with forum icons (read/unread) and category backgrounds today. Dropping an image background into the category strip is a brilliant way to style your forum and make the otherwise quite dull forum list come to life.

Forum icons are more problematic. Not changing them (I just uploaded over the default ones) but designing them! You want something that fits your subject matter but also relates to read/unread or posts. I've tried speech bubbles, quotes, envelopes... goes off to scratch head for a while

 

[ArnyVee]

Any instructions on how we should add category backgrounds?

I'd like to test out some things and that would give it a cool look.

 

[Ingenious]

Any instructions on how we should add category backgrounds?

I'd like to test out some things and that would give it a cool look.

Style properties / forum list / category strip / background - add your image, I used no-repeat and top left placement but change according to whether your width is fixed or fluid etc., I also made sure it was twice as deep as the default strip to ensure it worked OK when the category had a description under it too.