Book Image

Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial

By : Steve Atwal
Book Image

Building Websites with XOOPS : A step-by-step tutorial

By: Steve Atwal

Overview of this book

<p class="MsoNormal">XOOPS is an open source web content management system, written in PHP. It allows administrators to easily create dynamic websites with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more. It has a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.<br /><o:p><br /></o:p>If you want to create a powerful, fully-featured website in no time, this book is for you. This book will help you explore XOOPS, putting you in the picture of what it offers, and how to go about building a site with the system.<o:p></o:p><br />You will be introduced to the main components of XOOPS, and learn how to manage them. You will develop the skills and confidence to manage all types of content on the site, and also understand how users interact with the site. As you find your way round, your own ideas for what you need in your new website begin to crystallize around what you can see of the capabilities and flexibility of XOOPS.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">To make sure that you create the site that looks the way you want, the book covers working with themes to help define your look for your pages. A case study of developing an example Intranet rounds off the book.<o:p></o:p></p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Chapter 5. Creating Your Own Themes

Many themes are available from various sources for XOOPS. To pick one, you just need to decide the type of website you wish to have, e.g. either related to fitness, music, or sports.

We will look at what a theme is, how to install one, and then take a two-pronged approach to creating our own themes:

  • Modify an existing theme to create a customized version suitable for your website

  • Create a brand new theme

As before, we will install themes and show how they work on our demo website at xoopsbook.steveatwal.com.

What is a Theme?

A theme defines the general look and feel of a XOOPS site. The theme, or skin, allows the separation of code that runs in the background of the site from the way information is presented to the user. The benefit of this is that an administrator (or user with sufficient privileges) can easily change the look of a site by simply selecting a new theme and then applying it.

From a developer's perspective, a XOOPS theme consists of a set of files...