Once youre done testing, verifying and checking its time to export your style. As I explained earlier, the theme is stored in the database and contains, among other things, the colors for the moderator and administrator user links in the Whos Online box.

When youve come to the point when you feel that your template is complete, perfect in every regard, or perhaps just good enough, ask a couple of your friends and members of your family to check it out for you, post and test everything they can see. We tend to become blind to our own mistakes so its always a good idea to have someone else look it over and give you a second opinion. It will help you fix problems you may have ignored unknowingly.

Once youre done editing and feel confident everything works as intended and that every problem or bug has been fixed its time to consider releasing your template. Releasing your template is something both the phpBB project and the community benefits from and is a great way to support phpBB and give something back to the community.

You can create multiple themes to be associated with your style. These can introduce minor changes such as different fonts faces, colors or background images. In order for this to work it is important that you use all or some of the CSS code from subSilver's overall_header.tpl file. In case you have removed it from your copy of overall_header.tpl, you can simple copy it from subSilver's overall_header.tpl and paste it in your file. You can then remove or edit it as you like. Each of the variable placeholders here takes data from the theme configuration which is done in Administration Panel -> Styles Admin -> Management. The variable names and the field names are more or less the same so figuring out where what goes is relatively easy.

If you find it hard to keep track of what tpl file is used for what forum part or page theres a simple way to keep track of it. Open every tpl file and add an HTML comment containing its filename at the top and the bottom of it. So if you edit viewtopic_body.tpl you would add the comment <!-- start of viewtopic_body.tpl --> at the top, and <!-- end of viewtopic_body.tpl --> at the end of the file after all the other HTML and template code.

When you make a poll topic in phpBB, the result of the votes will be shown as bars, one for each option. These bars consist of three images, a left cap image, an image that is repeated to create the center of the bar and a right cap. The code for these bars can be found in viewtopic_poll_result.tpl.

The page for showing topics, viewtopic_body.tpl contains the buttons that are displayed below posts. I call these post buttons. Theres a post button for ICQ, and in the default subSilver template theres also a snippet for JavaScript code that shows a users ICQ online status by overlaying it with a green ICQ flower.