Starting out

[mvpcurtis]

Hello everyone.

As you can tell by the title of the post, I'm a newb to designing a mybb theme and I'm wondering if it's better create a theme using the .xml file with some sort of live preview(?) or do developers use the default theme provided with a copy of mybb, manually change the code and export the theme?

If anyone can help me out with this, I'd appreciate it a lot!

[User 6029]

Hello everyone.

As you can tell by the title of the post, I'm a newb to designing a mybb theme and I'm wondering if it's better create a theme using the .xml file with some sort of live preview(?) or do developers use the default theme provided with a copy of mybb, manually change the code and export the theme?

If anyone can help me out with this, I'd appreciate it a lot!

The standard way would be duplicating the default theme and corresponding template set and renaming both to your new theme name and then editing both new duplicated theme files and template set. Your live preview would be the active theme on the board as you edit it to your desires. While yes, you could instead say edit an xml theme file directly, it is not the reccomended way to do so.

[[ExiTuS]]

For a beginner the best way to edit and preview themes is using the Template editor in ACP. That is highly recommend for newbies to first get familar with the forums, themes and templates.

Just start playing around with some common templates of the standard theme and customize by yourself. Then you'll see what you've done after refreshing the forum. That's the way for learning MyBB themes. It takes some time but will let you soon crack into designing.
You need advanced HTML and CSS skills.

The original template and your customized one will be separately saved in database - so you never "overwrite" the original.

[ExiTuS]

[mvpcurtis]

Thank you to you both for the reply. I don't think the templates are that bad to understand and I'll look forward to the future