Personals/Classifieds Ad System
Customizing the Look of Your Personals/Classifieds System
The look of the Personals/Classifieds can be easily customized by you or your designers with no modifications to the actual program. Formatting information is stored in an external HTML template, and the images used as buttons can be replaced by other images.
Modifying the Images
When you installed Personals/Classifieds, you specified a directory where the images that it uses would be stored. Most of these images are the buttons used to post a message, reply to a message, etc. There are two images that correspond to each button, one for when the button is active (the user can click on it), and a second image for when the button is inactive. You can replace these buttons with images of your own to match the graphic look of your site. They can be any shape or size -- just make sure they are in .gif format, and that you use the same file names as the existing buttons.
The buttons are named as follows:
| Button Function |
Name of Active Button |
Name of Inactive Button |
| Previous |
prev1.gif |
prev2.gif |
| Next |
next1.gif |
next2.gif |
| Post |
post1.gif |
post2.gif |
| Reply |
reply1.gif |
reply2.gif |
| Category |
top1.gif |
top2.gif |
| Summary |
sum1.gif |
sum2.gif |
| Search |
search1.gif |
search2.gif |
| Help |
help1.gif |
help2.gif |
Modifying the HTML Templates
When you installed Personals/Classifieds, you specified a directory where the HTML templates that it uses would be stored. In this directory you'll need to modify two files to customize the look of your Personals/Classifieds:
template.html
This file is used as a design template throughout Personals/Classifieds, whether you're reading messages, posting a message, replying to a message, etc., the Personals/Classifieds software will use the HTML layout from that file. You can modify template.html in any way you want -- the only restriction is that you must leave in the two comment tags:
<!--TITLE--> - is used by Personals/Classifieds to replace the text in the <title></title> tag with whatever is appropriate. For example, if you go into a Topic area called "Interactive Design", the title of that page will be something like "Personals/Classifieds: Interactive Design".
<!--HYPERTHREAD--> - is where Personals/Classifieds inserts whatever information it's outputting. If you are reading a message, this is where it places that message within the HTML template. If you are posting a message, this is where it places the message entry form with the HTML template.
guide.html
This is the file used when somebody clicks on the "Help" button within Personals/Classifieds. You can give it the same layout as the template.html file to keep the look of your Personals/Classifieds consistent. Again, there are a couple of comment tags that you should leave alone: <!--BASE--> and <!--BACK-->
Other HTML Files To Modify
There is one other file within your Personals/Classifieds HTML directory.
menu.html
This file contains the introductory text that a user sees when they first come into the Personals/Classifieds discussion system. You'll definitely want to change the text to something appropriate for your site.
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