About how much of your site did you actually code yourself? By this I mean if you actually created web pages, made your own CSS/Modified other CSS, made modifications to your actual forum (not modifications found off google, but modifications made by yourself) and even custom style edits have you made? Do you just use a free forum host and work exclusively in your ACP or do you edit your site's files, create pages, and code php scripts yourself? I am wondering because I have put quite a bit of effort into designing my latest (unreleased) site and I am curious whether others put very much effort into designing their own sites, at least in an HTML, PHP, and CSS sense.
Quick Summary: How much actual code do you write for your own site? Do you make your own web pages or just use a free forum host?
I do a bit. I usually start with bits of code and mix them together, edit, remix, and modify until I get the general idea. From there I make or remix the images I need. After awhile of doing that I get a result i'm happy with 😛
I don't like free forum hosts to power my sites honestly, however I do see them as a great resource to new webmasters.
It wasn't that hard for me, luckily. In terms of completeness, it was but it wasn't. People could create accounts, new threads, reply, report threads, and edit their signatures. It was pretty bare bones in terms of functionality. No bbcode, smilies, quoting, or anything like that.
Actually, about half of the reasons you listed are why I only went as far as I did. For security, I stripped sql & select html tags; bbcode and censoring could probably be done with regex. Online users I presume would involve sessions or something, and for read/unread I really don't know. It's fun to mess around with, but gets complicated fairly quickly, once you start adding features.
My VB forum has a downloaded theme installed. I've made some small tweaks to customise the theme and had a designer create a custom logo and Nav Bar, to make the site unique.
I have mainly only modified the code and CSS. Usually I'll find a theme or a script that is close to what I want and then tweak it to my needs. Saves a lot of time that way. Some of my complex scripts I have paid coders to develop and then customize them as well.
Being able to code things yourself is a huge convenience. It means you don't end up relying on other people, and it also means you can make things exactly how you want them.
For example with FP's speech bubble design, I had a vision, knocked up the photoshop preview, presented it to the other Admins / Team leaders and then coded it exactly the same as the preview.
Next thing to tackle is Javascript / jQuery , and then PHP - I understand the latter is easier to learn, but you can make some really elegant site features with jQuery.
fantanoice — If you would like to learn to do that I suggest googling up a tutorial for php (if you want to write mods for unhosted software) and javascript/ajax for hosted software like ZB.
mikehawk — It does save time but cuts uniqueness.
Murder he Wrote — All I can do very well with Javascript is changing element attributes, like style.display for example. I can do a few other things but not as well.
Well, when I was running Batman Movie Forum (long gone now), which most of you probably haven't ever heard of, I found a fairly simple but neat style for phpBB3 and kind of self-taught myself to code it. I removed a search bar, and made custom logos and icons and added all of those in. That was really interesting, learning the language. I also installed all of the MODs, and errors were fairly common - but I kind of did a trial and error thing to fix those.
Me trying new things did end in a sort of downfall. I wanted to add in another one of my forums and its domain name, so I got the SQL database and gave it a go - and ultimately, I completely erased the SQL database of BMF. Well done, Sam.
I also know enough HTML to code a simple table-based layout (although I've probably forgotten most of it), a tiny bit of CSS, and the rest is beyond me. I find it makes the time fly past, and I enjoyed it.
