SMF Support > SMF 1.1.x Support

Linking to my SMF forum from my homepage

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protosilver:
Hi guys, new to the forum.  I downloaded SMF through Godaddy and got the forum up in 15 minutes!  I have had a few posts, from friends, and I really like how it works.  Now I want to customize the website much more, but I run into hiccups.  I have HTML/CSS pages, which I want to be my homepage.  I have a link to forums on the top of the screen, but when I reference to SMF files from my HTML something is lost.  How should I go about linking to my SMF and ultimately customizing the SMF to have my own  header and design features(basically I only need the function of the forum because I am good with CSS, but have no backend code knowledge. 

Ricky.:
I wonder why you have not installed SMF 2.0.2 , it is latest and better than 1.1.x
Regarding customization, SMF uses theme system, if you are using default them then you need to modify : Themes/default/index.template.php file, it contains function reponsible for header and footer area.

MrPhil:

--- Quote ---but when I [refer] to SMF files from my HTML
--- End quote ---
What exactly do you mean by that? The only thing you should be doing is linking into the forum's entry point (index.php). If you want links deeper into SMF, you can specify board numbers or even topic numbers in the URL. To do anything else with SMF from the outside would require use of the SSI.php interface, which means your site would have to be PHP, not HTML.

Once your visitor is inside SMF, they should not plan to bounce back and forth between SMF and your site content. You have no way to preserve session information doing that, without again bringing the rest of your site under PHP. This is going to be true of any PHP application (subsystem for your site) that has a logon, shopping cart, etc., not just SMF.

SMF can have added a button to exit it and go to somewhere else in your site, but plan to lose any session (i.e., logon) in the process.

Static HTML/JS/CSS is very limiting. Is the reason you're doing it that way because you need to use a WYSIWYG editor such as Dreamweaver or Expression Web?* Certainly, once you have HTML you like you can wrap it in PHP code, opening you up to the possibility of dynamic pages. You can continue using .html as your file links and either use URL rewriting to internally use PHP code, or tell your server to treat pages with .html extension as PHP pages. You can use SSI to interface with SMF, or you can make SMF your overall site core and install one of the "portal" mods to integrate pages outside of SMF proper. There are lots of things you can do -- think outside of plain HTML.

* Never, ever, use a WYSIWYG page editor such as DW or EW to edit PHP pages. It's far to easy to screw up your code. You will need to learn to use a real flat file text editor, such as Notepad++ or ViM, and an FTP client, such as FileZilla.

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