2BlueSolutions Developer Blog

Okay, let's begin digging a little deeper into the style code of the Agora Forum .  We're going to begin with editing the horizontal bars to help control the appearance of your forum. First, let's start with making sure you have the Firebug extension installed for Firefox.  The Firebug extension will really help shed a light on how the custom style sheet affects the horizontal bars.  Once installed, you can select the row in Firefox and see what styles are being used to control the row. The one key property you are looking for is height .  It is the height of each class that we will be changing to customize the size of the horizontal bars.  What this blog post will do is show you which classes to edit in your style sheets. Let us begin with the top horizontal bar, the main menu row of Agora Forum.  This one bar is controlled by the one class div.ag_rightend found in common.css ( /joomla/components/com_agora/style ).  Adjusting the height prop...

Most Active Users Section If you wish to remove the "Most Active Users" section of your forum, you'll need to comment out the top section of footer.tpl , which can be found in the templates directory of the Agora Forum component directory:   /components/com_agora/template/ Opening up footer.tpl , you'll find that the top section has the "Most Active Users" section surrounded by a starting and ending comment block.  To remove the "Most Active Users" from your forum, just comment out the code that is between the two comment blocks. Now, on a side note, this area is important, if you choose to keep the "Most Active Users" section, because this is one area you'll need to apply styles, if you are customizing the look of your Agora Forum.  Take note of this location and we'll come back to it in the post I make about customizing the look of your forum.

Making The Entire Cell "Clickable" The default settings for Agora Forum requires a user to click on the text of the forum/topic name to enter that forum/topic.  This isn't necessarily the most user friendly method of accessing your forums.  One way around this is to make the entire row cell click-able and then a user just needs to click anywhere on the cell.  You can see an example of this at the Prosupplements Forum . So, what one needs to do is make the cell a click-able object and the easiest way to accomplish this is to add an "onClick" event to the table cell.  

This will be the first of a few posts describing methods for customizing Agora Forum, a free component for Joomla . Before we begin, you will need to download the Agora Forum component .  After you download you and install it, let's take a look at the files that you'll need to become familiar with.

If you don't already have a backup file to use, install  JoomlaPack  and make a backup of your site and download the .jpa file that is created. These instructions will handle restoring your Joomla site onto a new server (server move) or back onto your own server (disaster recovery).  Take the .jpa file that you downloaded after using JoomlaPack and upload it to the root of the server you want to expand it onto (ie.   /www/)  using an FTP program or your server hosts administration file handling software.  Now, grab Kickstart and upload it alongside your .jpa file.  Kickstart will allow you to log into your server through a web browser and handle the extraction of the jpa file online. Once you have the Kickstart file and the JoomlaPack archive uploaded, browse to the location using a web browser (ie.  www.2bluesolutions.ca/kickstart.php).  If you can't find the file online, then double check where you uploaded it to and put in that ad...

Many of us would like to use non-standard fonts on our websites.  The old way used to involve creating a few different styles for different browsers along with different fonts for those browsers. I went through a situation where I converted a font from a Mac font to a Open Type Font (OTF) to a True Type Font (TTF) then, finally, to an Embedded Open Type (EOT) font.  Of course, one needs an EOT for Internet Explorer and a TTF for everything else (usually).  In my case, I needed to use 3 different programs to make the fonts that I needed! Well, now I've stumbled across a site called Font Squirrel  that will generate all the fonts that you need along with the CSS style code that you will need to use the fonts on your page.