(Request) How to edit Portal Tutorial

[Andre R.]

I see quite a few requests for a customised Portal.php, it is something I've wanted myself but failed to achieve successfully. I've been told that it can be done solely via templates edits, hence getting rid of the need for things like ProPortal (to some extent).

I was wondering if someone could write up a brief tutorial on how to edit portal templates to achieve things like:

How to create boxes (that you could put things like images, Facebook code, gallery images in)
How to position these boxes (centre, left, right), stacking them etc.
How to do other things that I may not be aware of, title boxes, integrating twitter, whatever it might be.

I'm sure this would be warmly welcomed by the community.

[pavemen]

First off, unless the external links, portal code or a plugin generates the content for the boxes you want, its not just templates edits.

In my case, I make a generic portal box template that fits the overall theme/templates and I have a variable for the box name and box contents. Then my code (portal or plugin) creates the two variables and eval's the generic portal box as normal and I put that eval'd variable into the portal template where I want.

So the biggest issue is deciding what content you want to show on the portal and how you can get that content. Displaying it is the easy part.

[Andre R.]

Getting complex already.

What i was thinking was that the tutorial could at least show how to create and position boxes and could carry some sort of default content such as; a facebook like code, some sort of updates posted by the admin (e.g This months member of the month is...!).

I'm not quite following what you meant, but are you talking about the difference between what i put above and something like a {$welcomebox}?

[pdtrx]

How to create boxes (that you could put things like images, Facebook code, gallery images in)

Just by adding this code in the template where you want it to show:

<table border="0" cellspacing="{$theme['borderwidth']}" cellpadding="{$theme['tablespace']}" class="tborder">
<tr>
<td class="thead"><strong>Box heading here</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="trow1"><span class="smalltext">Box content here</span></td>
</tr>
</table>
<br />

How to position these boxes (centre, left, right), stacking them etc.

Using DIV tags:

<div style="text-align/float: left/center/right;">INSERT_BOX_CODE_HERE</div>

How to do other things that I may not be aware of, title boxes, integrating twitter, whatever it might be.

1) Create the boxes
2) Insert the code

[killuminati]

How to create boxes (that you could put things like images, Facebook code, gallery images in)

Just by adding this code in the template where you want it to show:

<table border="0" cellspacing="{$theme['borderwidth']}" cellpadding="{$theme['tablespace']}" class="tborder">
<tr>
<td class="thead"><strong>Box heading here</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="trow1"><span class="smalltext">Box content here</span></td>
</tr>
</table>
<br />

How to position these boxes (centre, left, right), stacking them etc.

Using DIV tags:

<div style="text-align/float: left/center/right;">INSERT_BOX_CODE_HERE</div>

How to do other things that I may not be aware of, title boxes, integrating twitter, whatever it might be.

1) Create the boxes
2) Insert the code

How would I put that table in the side-box ?