header graphic

[chrisj13]

I am very, very new to coding and even newer to vbulletin. I only want to do one thing: Change the header to a pic and put the buttons in the upper right corner of that graphic. Where do I start? I spent 2 hrs reading last night on the forums, searched high and low, but I'm still missing a piece somewhere. I can get my header/pic posted up above, but all the button links are below the pic and I don't know how to move them on top of the pic. Any help would be HUGELY appreciated. My website is at www.yacht-talk.com. thank you!

[Old-Git]

About 4 - 5 days ago I was like you, struggling to find out how to do any of this...now I can skin a VB4 forum with ease. Here's how....

Over on the vbulletin.com forum you'll find a document called '10 steps to skinning your forum'. This is where you want to start with all this. The first page of this doco will tell you exactly how to do this header thing and more besides. On the same upload you'll probably find another document that will give a breakdown of some of the stylevars for setting colours etc. this has since been replaced with three new documents which cover stylevar settings for CMS, BLOG and FORUMS. You'll find a link to those in the sidebars to the right of the main forum pages, again on Vbulletin.com.

Once you get beyond the 10 steps document you will need time and patience to work through the stylevar dictionaries but it's worth if it as it is all very easy in the end and the effects can be stunning. Bear in mind though that the Stylevars are still a work in progress and one or two of them don't yet work as they ought to, whilst others are just not yet documented!

I used Adobe Photoshop Elements to create my graphics and backgrounds and also used some of the gradient images that come with VB4 to layer these images so I could acheive a consistent look from Title Header to forum Header to forum footers, etc. etc. This probably means nothing to you right now but as you play with the settings you'll begin to understand what I mean.

btw there's only one gotcha in the 10 steps document that I've seen so far and that's towards the end of the doc where he suggests changing the footer on the 'post new thread' form. it works a treat here and is as he says, but later when you're reading a thread you'll notice that at the bottom of the thread that the 'quick reply' section is also wearing that graphic only (especially if you stuck to his image size recommendations) and that it's no longer big enough to cover the whole of the other two areas where it now also appears. Again you'll understand all this better when you've tried it for yourself.

Rgds

Pete

PS when you've worked through all this you'll get a huge buzz from having skinned your first forum... I know I did!

[chrisj13]

thank you for the detailed post. I will check it out and report back.