When it comes to designs for phpBB, two terms are used the most: template and style. These are not the same even though downloadable designs for phpBB are by the phpBB Group referred to as styles.

Style

The Style is a set of template files combined with one or several Themes.

Template

A Template is a set of files; it supplies the layout and structure of a style. Imagine a house that's under construction, all you see is a skeleton, concrete pillars and open floors. A template without a style is exactly that, a skeleton.

Theme

The style is stored in the database and is what affects the visual design, the theme determines what fonts and colors are used and what background images are used for the various page elements (such as headers on boxes et c). Applied on the house metaphor above, the theme is the paint and architectural details of the building.

The phpBB template engine, that is the part of phpBB that takes the template files as input and generates the forum as you see it in your browser, loads the template files and then take the data from the database and combines these and generates HTML which it then serves to the browser. The theme is stored in the database as a series of colors and filenames. The template engine takes this information as well and serves it to the browser as CSS code which the browser then applies to the HTML the template engine has generated.

Many templates use a separate CSS file instead of using themes, it makes it easier to edit and you can add your own CSS classes and rules. I prefer this method over storing the theme data in the database as a theme. The drawback is however that you can no longer change fonts and colors from within the admin panel but I will return to this later.

Templates and themes are therefore both necessary to change the design of your phpBB board. Together they are known as Styles but I don't think it's a very well-chosen term. It makes a lot of more sense to let Style refer to the information that is used for the stylesheet and template to the actual files. I, among other people, would propose: Template + Style = Theme

However, as I noted, in phpBB lingo:

Template + Theme = Style

I am using the words Style and Template interchangeably here but just for the sake of clarity and in official terms: theme is what's in the database, template is what's on the harddrive and taken together they form a style.

Once you're all set, proceed to the next chapter where we'll create the foundation for your template and upload it to the server.