Intergration with site design

[JasonG]

We are developing a new site design to replace our current design which is on view at www.webdesignerstalk.com.

We have set up a private test forum and started our new design. Our new design is done mostly using CSS and the main parts are:

header.php - the bit of the design after the body tag before any content
footer.php - the bit of the design before the closing body tag after any content
global.css - all the CSS styles for the site design

We will only have one style for the forums and do not wish to maintain two copies of the site design, e.g. one for forums and one for the rest. How would I go about including the above files in the correct places? And how do I reduce the chances of conflicts between the two stylesheets, the site one, and the forums one.

The test forum is running vB 3.5 Beta 3 at the moment.

Thanks

P.s. Apologies if this is in the wrong forum.

--- Edit ---

Nevermind, i've worked it out myself. I'll post my solution if anyone else is looking for the same answer.

In a global_start hook I added:

PHP Code:

$virtual_root = "../";
$real_root = $_ENV["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."/";

ob_start();
include("../inc/header.php");
$myHeader = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

ob_start();
include("../inc/footer.php");
$myFooter = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();

$myStyleSheet = "<link href=\"../inc/layout.css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />"; 


Note: the top two lines are not needed if you want to use the above code, and are just there as they are just needed for the way my site is coded.

Then in the templates, I simple added $myHeader, $myFooter and $myStyleSheet in the necessary places and it worked.

I had a conflict with some of my lists in my layout, but overcome this by being more specific in my css definitions for them.

Also note that I split my original stylesheet into two stylesheets. One which contains the layout CSS called layout.css and one which contains the CSS used on non vB pages called nonvb.css to reduce conflicts. nonvb.css is only included in pages which have nothing to do with vB. layout.css is included in all pages.

[lightnb]

Thanks for posting you solution! I was trying to do the same thing, but could only get the header in the right place. got the footer working now too.

thanks for sharing.