Are there plans to support phpBB themes?

[lemmynet]

Are there plans to support phpBB themes?

[Nutomic]

The problem is that each phpBB theme includes its own HTML template files, which can be completely distinct.

If you want to make a theme work with lemmybb, you need to follow these steps:

• Clone this repo
• Place the theme's css files (and other assets) in assets/styles/
• Rewrite everything in templates/ folder to make it work with theme's css and handlebars templating.

The last step is obviously the most complicated one. Filenames in templates folder are hardcoded in lemmybb, so you cant change them, and they dont relate to phpbb file structure because I took the HTML from a running phpbb site, not from the raw templates files.

Basically there will be some trial and error to get things working. If you want to give it a try, I suggest you make a pull request with your changes, so others can follow along and help out. Once its working and if the theme is open source, we can include it with lemmybb to give some different choices to users.

[Tealk]

this is not so easy, because there is no standardized handling for the phpbb templates

also they all need to be customized to work with lemmy

[mu-arch]

How stable do you feel the codebase is right now for things like element names? I am very excited about this project but I want to wait until things are fleshed out so I don't wind up doing a lot of work twice.

[Nutomic]

Most of what you see in the templates are lines like {{{markdown site_data.site.site_view.site.sidebar}}}. That looks complicated but its really just using Lemmy structs directly from the api/database. That is completely stable and will not change. There are some things which might be refactored sooner or later such as pagination, but nothing major. And for now I can easily prioritize other work, there is plenty to do.

Btw if we can merge your theme into this repo, it should be easy to add test cases which detect breakage. That would help to stabilize the template rendering and make it easier to develop more themes.