ExpressionEngine® User Guide

Legacy Documentation

You are using the documentation for version 4.3.8. Go here for the latest version.

Forum Themes

Control Panel Location: Developer ‣ Templates ‣ Forums

The ExpressionEngine Forums make use of “themes” to determine how they are displayed. The Forum Module comes with several “default” themes.

Theme assets such as images are located in your installation under themes/ee/forum/ in a folder named after the theme.

The theme templates are located in system/ee/templates/_themes, also in a folder named after the theme.

In order to edit the Templates:

  1. Copy themes/ee/forum/theme_name/ to themes/user/forum/custom_theme_name/
  2. Copy system/ee/templates/_themes/theme_name to system/user/templates/_themes/custom_theme_name/

Note

The contents of themes/ee/ and system/ee are replaced every update, and any changes made there will be lost. All customization needs to happen in themes/user/ and system/user/.

To make edits to the templates from inside the Control Panel, set the system/user/templates/_theme/ folders and files to be writable. See File Permissions for details. Only themes in the system/user/templates/_theme/ folder will be available for editing in the Control Panel.

You can easily switch the default theme used by the forum by choosing a new one under Default Preferences.