If you've been linked to this topic, you've probably asked if something can be changed, found a bug, or are being presented with a small tweak.
What follows should be a list of files to open, what to look for, and what to add or replace to what you find. To do this, you'll need a text editor of some sort. Notepad will work, but won't give you line numbers and a few other things - other editors include
ConTEXT,
Crimson Editor, and
EditPad.
Once you have a text editor, you'll need to get to the files. This means using FTP to download the file in question, opening it with whatever text editor you wish to use, making the changes, and then uploading it again.
Sometimes, we may leave off common paths to files. Here's a list of some of them:
- Admin.php, QueryString.php, etc. (files ending in .php) are usually in Sources/.
- Something.template.php or similar is usually found in your theme's directory - for example, Themes/converted or Themes/yourtheme. However, it's usually a bad idea to modify the default theme... instead, you should make a copy of the file and then upload the modified file to that folder.
- Something.english.php (or any other language) should be in Themes/default/languages.
As to the changes themselves, usually they will be either "find" and "replace" (meaning, find a block of code and replace it with another block..) or "find" and add above/below/after/before. In the latter case, you should just add the code block to said position relative to the code to find, on a separate line. For example, if someone said you should find:
Line 1And add after that line:
Line 2The result should be two separate lines, like so:
Line 1
Line 2If you're not comfortable with modifying files directly, you may wish to ask someone to do it for you, or request a package be made for use with the package manager. Often such things take much more time, however.
Importantly, whenever modifying files, always - and I do mean always - make backups. You don't know what could cause problems with your forum and, as much as you might want a change, your forum at least working would probably be better than no forum at all.
-[Unknown]
