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SMF 2.0.17 and old themes

Started by Oldwood, June 05, 2020, 04:41:45 PM

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Oldwood

I have a members only forum (old school year group) which I sadly let fester for the last 10 years (last update 1.1.17).  There has been no activity since 2009 but the lockdown due to the Corona virus has prompted me to try and bring it back to life.  I upgraded to 2.0.17 and ran the repair tool but after a week of delving around in the innards I am still pretty lost (I haven't touched php for 10 years either).  My main problem at the moment is that I can't get any of the menu systems back up and running.  There appears to be two problems: (i) the admin screens are completley bereft of much of the text which describes their function (even after running the repair tool and clearing the file cache), and (ii) the menu which (used to) appear on all pages and which allowed navigation around the site is missing.  After reading some of the help messages associated with themes I'm wondering whether this is the issue.  The theme which contains the javascript stuff and images for the menu worked in 1.1.17 and is called Bridge1.  Some one may recall this theme (I did not create it - I'm not that clever).   I have two questions related to this theme (which I believe is pretty basic): (a) can it be made to function effectively in 2.0.17 without too much work?, and (b) having searched through all the dozens of php scripts in the 1.1.17 installation I can find no reference to this theme and so don't know how the contents of the theme folder were implemented.  Any clues as to how I should move forward would be greatly appreciated.   

Illori

your theme for SMF 1.1.* will not work with SMF 2.0.*

you can use repair_settings.php to reset the theme to default. it should fix this.

What is repair_settings.php?

Antechinus

It is possible to make 1.1.x themes work in 2.0.x, but it can end up being a fair bit of messing around in the innards. I've done it on test sites, just because I wanted some old themes running for reference (and possible resurrection) but if you're not up to speed with templating and CSS it's best to just get a theme that already works.

Oldwood

Quote from: Illori on June 05, 2020, 04:51:38 PM
your theme for SMF 1.1.* will not work with SMF 2.0.*

you can use repair_settings.php to reset the theme to default. it should fix this.

What is repair_settings.php?

Appreciate you taking your time to respond but looking at what I'm getting now I obviously went deep into the scripts and made a lot of design changes to the theme which I implemented.  I created personal menu systems and cut out a lot of the forum functionality which was not relevant to what I was trying to do.  Have tried the repair script and am no further forward.  I like what I created 10 years ago and am trying to recreate the same user experience.     

Oldwood

Thanks for your input and for giving me some hope of recovering th design work I doid 10 years ago.  I'm trying various options to get the old theme up and running again but I can't see how to make it the main theme without tweaking the sql database.  Is there a switch or php script somewhere which sets this?   

Doug Heffernan

Quote from: Oldwood on June 07, 2020, 12:02:08 PM
Thanks for your input and for giving me some hope of recovering th design work I doid 10 years ago.  I'm trying various options to get the old theme up and running again but I can't see how to make it the main theme without tweaking the sql database.  Is there a switch or php script somewhere which sets this?

Can you enter your Admin Panel?

Illori

did you reset to the default theme when using repair_settings.php?

once you get the forum working again, then you can try to customize the theme. your old theme will never work with SMF 2.0.

Deaks

oldwood, the changes between 1.1 and 2.0 are immense as Ant said its not for faint hearted this is why you dont see themes for both the few you do are rare.  You mention the menu system you had was unique, unfortunatley that is one that that was re-written so its likley now to be easier for you to do it on 2.0.  Also alot of things have been improved since then.    What other addons did you manually have? maybe we can help you making smf 2.0.17 have same functionality as your old design.
~~~~
Former SMF Project Manager
Former SMF Customizer

"For as lang as hunner o us is in life, in nae wey
will we thole the Soothron tae owergang us. In truth it isna for glory, or wealth, or
honours that we fecht, but for freedom alane, that nae honest cheil gies up but wi life
itsel."

Antechinus

The biggest thing with getting an old 1.1. theme up and running, in rough workable form as a starting point, is the language strings. All the old ones used stuff like [smf389] instead of the newer ['realenglishthattellsyouwhatitdoes'].

If you go through your templates and do a find/replace on the old language strings you will at least have working menus, linktrees, etc. It's a tad tedious, but it's not that difficult. After that there will still be a lot of other things to do (log in forms are one example) and old markup and CSS is not likely to be useful for modern browsing anyway (not responsive, etc).

The short version is you'll most likely end up building something from scratch, like you did originally.

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