A Yamato's (Read: Dummy's) Guide to TemplatesApr 7, 2020 20:24:48 GMT -5
So you want to make your own template? Awesome! Me too! The internet is a big place, which is why it's a bit hard to find all the resources you need to accomplish such a task, but worry not scared NFB citizen, I'm here to help. I taught myself how to make templates from scratch which is why this thread will only be a beginner's guide to templates. Templates are really just like lego! I'll teach you how the individual pieces work, but it'll be up to you to make something great. If you ever feel discouraged on this learning journey, just remember, if a dummy like me could do it, then so can you! If you're going to follow along, now would be the time to open a new tab. Go ahead and make a new thread in the GFX board, wait for the page to completely load (because at the time of writing, the site is supeeeer slow), and click that little tab in the bottom left corner that says 'BBCode'. These two little tabs 'Preview' and 'BBCode' are a dummy's best friend. While you create your template, you should primarily be on the BBCode tab, but you should frequently switch to preview just to see how your template looks. Now, one final step of preparation and then we can really get into the nitty gritty. Open up a plain text file, and keep it handy. Every time you make some progress with your template, you should paste it into that text document and slap ctrl+s. There's a million and one things that can go wrong while doing something on site, and you'll be thanking me one day when you accidentally delete your entire template, but fortunately you've got that text file backup. To start with, you'll need to need to let your browser know that what you type should not be displayed as text, but be formatted as code. How do you do that? With brackets, of course! For our first piece of code we'll use the following: [div align="center"][/div]What the hell is this? Let's break it down. That first piece [div align="center"]announces to the browser that anything after it should be centered. Of course if you just leave it at that your code won't work. That's why you need to add the second bit [/div]to complete the code. This applies to essentially everything in BBCode, for every piece of code you write, you will need to add the corresponding /'thing' to complete it. Now let's get to some more fun stuff! Inside of your previous code, we're going to write another piece of code. It should look like this [div align="center"][div style="description:property;description:property;"][/div][/div]It looks daunting, but worry not, it's actually quite simple. Inside of the quotation marks is where you specify all the neat little features you want for your template! You start with the feature you'd like, such as the width of your template, then specify it after the colon. You separate all the features with a semicolon. So this... [div align="center"][div style="width:500px;background-color:pink;"][/div][/div]would mean that your template so far is centered, the width of it is 500 pixels, and the background color of it is pink. Go ahead and try it out! Type some text into in between :pink;"] and [/div and then click on preview to see your fine work. And that's it! You have officially created your first ever template. From here, it is totally possible for you to go out onto the vast internet and research what other neat things you can add to your template all by your lonesome. Don't want to do that? That's fine too! In the next post down, I'll have several more neato features you can add to your template with some quick explanations!
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Yamato
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