Coffee, Conversation And ZUBB - A Custom Job (
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It's quite possible that you won't like the
plain-vanilla interface that ships with ZUBB by default. Not to worry - as with
all things in Zope, customizing the appearance of the board to your own particular
requirements is fairly simple.
ZUBB comes with a default stylesheet named "local_css" - you'll see it in the
folder containing the discussion forum. You can use this default stylesheet very
simply, by creating a DTML method named "standard_html_header" and adding the
following lines to it:
<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="local_css" type="text/css">
</head> <body>
Now, the next time you browse to the ZUBB forum, you should see something like
this:
You can now easily alter the appearance of the pages by modifying the style rules
in the CSS file.
If you take a look inside the folder containing the discussion board in the Zope
management interface, you'll see a large number of DTML methods. Each of these
methods contains, in addition to Zope program code, regular HTML formatting instructions
that can also be used to alter the layout of the Web pages that make up ZUBB.
Here's a list of the important methods in the folder
index_html - the home page for the discussion forum
instructions - the instructional text that appears when posting messages
local_css - the stylesheet rules for the forum
postForm - the form used to post new messages, or start new discussions threads
post - the form processor for postForm
new_posts - the list of new posts
replyForm - the form used to reply to existing messages, or add to current threads
reply - the form processor for replyForm
searchForm - the search engine form
search - the search engine form processor
zubb_top_nav - the menu that appears at the top of every ZUBB page
Using the Zope management interface, it's fairly simple to customize the appearance
of each of these elements...and, if you're familiar with DTML, even alter how
they work.
Here's another example of a ZUBB forum customized in this manner:
