We are embarking on an adventure to move our forums to vBulletin as part of a major site overhaul. This is particularly an adventure for us, because while we aren't dumb, we know little about Web coding yet. So, I thought I would recount my first experience as your average clueless one.
The first thing I had to do was change the colors in the admin panel after getting an email from fellow, chief volunteer saying he couldn't read the options in the menu. I agreed. Since there is no mention of a template for the admin panel in the templates list, I checked here where I found messages saying that the cp.css had to be edited. Ah ha!
I found the cp.css. So far, so good. Having read some stuff about CSS, I understand the basic principles, but how to discern which settings control which elements of the page display. I spent quite a long time, couple hours maybe, simply trying to determine the relationship between what was in the cp.css and what I saw on the page. Since I don't intuitively know what color a hex code represents, I had to translate the codes into colors to figure out what went with what. This is made a bit more difficult by the fact that some of the purples are very close. Finally, I got a better idea of what needed to be changed, but I still needed to trial-and-error through a couple versions of the cp.css, changing colors and font sizes, to figure it out enough to make the simple changes I wanted.
After mostly figuring out what in cp.css controlled what in the display, it took probably another couple hours of trying changes to finally get something readable. As I couldn't find a way to create a facsimile of the page on my PC, I could only try the changes by uploading a new cp.css to the server each time. Not a big deal, just a bit more time consuming.
Anyway, from the time I started on the quest to find out how to change the colors and font sizes in the admin panel to the time I finished took about 7 hours. Time flies when you're having fun. A mention in the user guide of how to change the basic display of the admin panel and/or a few more lines of comments in the cp.css would have been very welcome.
The first thing I had to do was change the colors in the admin panel after getting an email from fellow, chief volunteer saying he couldn't read the options in the menu. I agreed. Since there is no mention of a template for the admin panel in the templates list, I checked here where I found messages saying that the cp.css had to be edited. Ah ha!
I found the cp.css. So far, so good. Having read some stuff about CSS, I understand the basic principles, but how to discern which settings control which elements of the page display. I spent quite a long time, couple hours maybe, simply trying to determine the relationship between what was in the cp.css and what I saw on the page. Since I don't intuitively know what color a hex code represents, I had to translate the codes into colors to figure out what went with what. This is made a bit more difficult by the fact that some of the purples are very close. Finally, I got a better idea of what needed to be changed, but I still needed to trial-and-error through a couple versions of the cp.css, changing colors and font sizes, to figure it out enough to make the simple changes I wanted.
After mostly figuring out what in cp.css controlled what in the display, it took probably another couple hours of trying changes to finally get something readable. As I couldn't find a way to create a facsimile of the page on my PC, I could only try the changes by uploading a new cp.css to the server each time. Not a big deal, just a bit more time consuming.
Anyway, from the time I started on the quest to find out how to change the colors and font sizes in the admin panel to the time I finished took about 7 hours. Time flies when you're having fun. A mention in the user guide of how to change the basic display of the admin panel and/or a few more lines of comments in the cp.css would have been very welcome.
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