How difficult is it to style the forums?

UX
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I am working on an MMO game website. We are using PHPBB 3.1 for our forums. The bosses want to change to Discourse forums after viewing Tree of Savior’s forums. I have many questions but the first is how easy is it to style the forums to match the rest of a website. Here is our current website - http://sacramentgame.com. The site is built with Bootstrap 3 framework. Our forums were implemented by another person so the styling is not quite the same. I am restyling them on a staging site to make sure everything matches as best I can. The staging forums are at http://staging.sacramentgame.com/forum. It’s a work in progress. Any insight to difficulty or ease of styling would be greatly appreciated.

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2

You will be looking at mostly CSS changes. There is no easy way to change the html (apart from adding stuff to header/footer etc). So it depends on your design and front end (CSS) code skills I guess.

Have a look at the ‘visit our discourse forums’ thread for inspiration :slight_smile:

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Thank you. Took a look at some of the sites. Most have very little styling but a couple of the gaming sites do have nice layouts. This looks like something I could handle.

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Sorry for the off-topic, but this is a huge forum for Discourse to land. It’s probably one of the biggest (if not the biggest) instances to date.

5

@FoxdenVixen @AstonJ it actually is relatively easy to change the HTML on a number of areas.

This post provides some info on how to customize the templates.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-customize-discourse-templates/34813

We have changed a bit of the category template for desktop and mobile at HelloForos

@FoxdenVixen have you decided whether to move to Discourse?

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We are moving forward with Discourse as we found someone who can do the migration from MySql to PostgresSQL. Now I am gathering apps that I will need to create a local staging instance of the new forums where I will re-style it to match our current site. It is not user friendly by any means. This is for seasoned developers in my opinion. I run Windows 10 but have to create a Virtual Machine in order to run this. Unfortunately, I am a designer not a developer. I appreciate the documentation linked above so I can figure this all out.

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