Templates

Over the two months, Jim and I have been working on some open source stuff for the Phorum message board system. This was a way for Jim to stretch his coding muscle, as well as for me to have fun designing templates. The cool thing was taking open source graphics and combining them with colors and layouts that were pleasing to the eye. I posted some of the Warcraft headers below. However, there's a lot of other neat designs that were created. You can head over to our coding site to check them out.

If you are looking for a forum system, you may want to check out Phorum. It is not as "plug-and-play" as some systems, but it really is a sturdy system that you can set-up pretty much any way you want. The key selling point for us was the fact that you can actually allow the forum to be displayed in the standard flat mode, or you can have it show up in a threaded-tree. There's also a hybrid of the views too. This was important for us since one of my main sites used a system that was threaded and we wanted to keep that option open for our users. However, some of our users were really begging that we move to a flat-view system, since that is what they are used to. It's great to be able to accomodate both camps.

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A few of my favorite designs are linked below. You can click on the picture to go to the info page and see a bigger screenshot.

1. Believe it or not, this is my favorite this design. I wouldn't really consider myself a military girl, even though my parents met and married while in the Marines--and they almost named me Maureen Cora! Still, I just think the colors and the background on this one look very sharp.



2. The next one has a simplistic design, but I just love the cool color scheme. You'd never guess I was an "autumn" from this theme!



3. The following is not my design, but was originally a template for Wordpress. I absolutely adore the colors (and you CAN tell I'm an autumn by my love for this template). I used the original theme on a coffee-themed website. I'm really happy how the port over to Phorum turned out.



4. The last one is not so much neat in design as it is cool in nostalgia. I'm old enough to remember when all monitors looked like this. I suppose it's obvious I love retro computer stuff, particularly with all of the parodies we do in Bitmap World. It was only natural that I would want to do a template calling back to the days past of computers: