July 06, 2003
Using your control panel
This masterclass covers all customisable aspects of the control panel.

by atlass

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Welcome to ezboard! Now that you've created your board, you'll be wanting to find out how to customise it. You don't have to know a lot about coding to make your board unique and homely. Let's start off in the my community page...

1. General Settings
In this section you'll find an annoucement field - you can use plain text, or add html into this area. Don't add any form tags, as this can stop your board from functioning correctly.

2. Features settings
This section of your control panel allows you to turn off or on several options, such as whether you have borders, where to show moderators, and how to show page numbering on large threads. It's a good idea to become aquainted with the features in this section.

3. Member Management
As well as organising your members, you have an option in this area to edit your member levels. You can customise the titles that different levels have under their names. It's possible to add html into this title area, but be careful about what you add, as some codes will disrupt the viewing of your control panel. It's always a good idea to use a span tag with a class, then keep the definitions to the stylesheet. But you can add images into this section too.

4. Custom Colours
Quite self explanatory - this section lets you change the colours of the various elements of your board. You can also choose to use an image in the background area of the headings and categories.

5. Custom Images
Other than the two images mentioned above, this area will allow you to edit all the buttons and icons and other images on your board. That includes custom emoticons, and posticons.

6. Theme Management
Theme management allows you to save the settings from feature options, custom colours, and custom images into what is called a tdf, or theme definition file. You can them import a new tdf to totally change your board.

Many elements of the forums can be controlled separately, and are described as follows:

7. General Settings
You can add both a description about the forum (which appears on the main page of the board) and an introduction to the forum (which appears on the main page of that particular forum) in this area. Both of those fields will accept html. You can also use html in the "display name" of the forum.

8. Custom Images
As above, this section allows you to edit the images of this forum separately. You cannot edit emoticons or posticons on a forum level, however.

9. Custom Colours
Again, this allows you to edit the colours of one particular forum separately. Some colours aren't changable on a forum level, however - such as border colour.

10. Theme Management
And as you can imagine - this means that you can import or export a tdf for the colours and images of just one forum.