Using different styles on forumhome

[Sharron]

I can't find any answers to this but it's hard to know what I am searching for so apologies if it is answered but I missed it.

Our VB has quite a number of different categories, each of which is going to be using a different style. Each of the styles is using the same parent template but with different colours.

On the forum home page we need each of the categories to show using the colours that the boards will become once members go into them. The category header strip is the same on all except for having a different icon added to it. The forum header strip (forum, last post, threads etc) below and the first alt and second alt colours are the bits that change.

I can do this by creating new css styles for each category and using an if conditional for every one in the forumhome_forumbit_level1_nopost template and doing the same in forumhome_forumbit_level2_post but this obviously means I am going to be duplicating a lot of the code just to change the colours displayed.

So, is there an easy way, which I can't see for looking, of setting the styles to be used on each template as variables so that at the start of each I can set it that if forum id ="1", $style=green, if forum id ="2" $style =red etc etc then use style as a varible as the class such as <td class="$style"> ?

I can't install any hacks or add ons or touch the actual code as this is a huge national board with over 370,00 members so we can't afford to risk any more than having to remake the templates on updates.

I hope that makes sense.