[Adrian Ko]

What an amazing skin. I found it straightforward to customize. I chose this because we're an academic site, and it was difficult to find something that I could adapt to our aesthetic style. Many layouts try to reach out and grab the attention of your skull. What we were after was a template that allowed the look of our organization to transcend that of the interface. We wanted a minimalist approach. I also need this to be simple, because like many of you I only have to decorate vB when all older templates are no longer compatable with the latest release of software, making each upgrade a learning curve.

Our look had already been established. Under our previous version (2.3 -- yeah, I know, we didn't upgrade for a very long time) I had limited success.

Now with v.3.6.2, a lot can be done directly in the AdminCP instead of me hacking the files directly.

This is what I've done with it, and it only took me a few days.

My main site is http://swordforum.com/ -- so the challenge was to customize Chestnut to look like my main site.

Here are the results:

http://forums.swordforum.com/

The only significant code changing was with the background image aligntment and positioning -- that was done in the CSS file. I kept the "left.gif" and "right.gif" as transparent GIFs with a 1 px vertical line to give the layout an outline. Keeping them also created some fake left- and right-padding which ended up looking nice.

I like the mouse-over fades, so I customized it, so different antique swords appear. I also customized the navbits to use swords instead of folders.

So here is a bow of respect to the Chestnut author! Merci beaucoup, Allan-san!

P.S. One bug I found was that if you have a forum category that serves as its own lone forum, the layout is stretched extremely wide. To solve this, I created a forum category and move that forum as a child of that category. Once I did this, the forum listing was the same width as the other boxes.