Here at Ravish U we recognize that not everyone shares our love of pink, and to further enhance our users' Ravishment experience we have installed and configured a variety of customization and enhancement options. This post will guide interested students new and old in the art of using themes and colors to change the way that our site looks to them.

Changing colors

At the top of our forum you'll see a multi-colored bar which has wonderful, mysterious powers. Each of these colors has the power to change the color scheme that the board sends to you.

For example, if you move your mouse to the bar and pick the second blue block from the left, you the board will appear blue to you each time that you log in to the website (you must be logged in to see these changes).

Here is the board after changing the color to dark blue:


Using themes

After a while, everyone gets bored with the same-old same-old. dilbert-multicolor day in, day out ho-fucking hum.

Using obscure SMF settings you can change the way that the entire layout of our website is presented to you.

All you have to do is pick out a theme from the theme page. Unfortunately the them page is tucked away somewhere that most people would never think to look. Here's how you get to it!


1)Click on the 'profile' link at the top of your page (circled above)
2)Click on the 'Look and Layout Preferences' link to the left (circled above)
3)Click on the '(change)' link (circled above)

This will lead you to a page with a list of different themes which will change the way that the board will look to you. Look over the list, check out the preview images and when you've found one you like, press 'use this theme'. For this example we'll pick the 'smf default theme' from this page:


And this is how the board will look after loading the theme (smf default) that we've picked out:


And that's it! Now that you know how to pick out colors or themes to enhance the look of Ravish U, feel free to take some time to try out different themes or color schemes until you find one that you like!

[KissyFace]

What a great post, Nathan!    Very Informative!    Thanks!

[NightStalker73au]

Nathan excellent post.

Thanks, guys! I hope it helps people out.

[Lois]

Great idea.  Pictures are worth a thousand words!  And more than that if you can't read.

[Vivienne]

Welldone nathan!!! - Hope we get a mo' vivid Discussion 'bout our Central Theme now!! Poll Guyz'n'Gals, Pooooll!!

[RopeFiend]

And with the latest mod, you can pimp your profile the same way you do on MySpace, even using the same tools like Thomas' MySpace Editor
First, go to your profile and then check the box under 'Customized profile' that says 'Enable customized profile?' and go to town!

 


   allowed tags = 'b', 'i', 'u', 'a', 'p', 'br', 'span', 'style', 'div', 'img', 'hr', 'table', 'tr', 'td', 'object', 'embed', 'param', 'ul', 'ol', 'li'
   allowed attributes = 'href', 'title', 'id', 'class', 'style', 'align', 'type', 'src', 'height', 'width', 'alt', 'valign', 'border', 'cellspacing', 'cellpadding', 'colspan', 'name', 'value'

I'm still trying to get the EMBED to work safely with SWF applets in the MEDIA box.  Stay tuned!


One note on your photo album uploads: it seems to get shitty if you have an ampersand & in your photo name, so just rename 'em a little in that case.

[Lois]

It's looking great, I got my first buddy today!

looks awesome, too bad I never figured out how to do myspace layouts or anything

Great job, RopeFiend, great job! 

[RopeFiend]

The 'nuts and bolts' of what you can do to the profile CSS is pretty confusing for MOST of us.  There's a whole bunch of good sites that can tweak your MySpace (and RavishU) profiles with a simple point-and-click interface.  The 'Thomas MySpace Editor' above is just one of many.  Here's a handful I just googled:

http://www.pimp-my-profile.com/generators/myspace.php

http://www.realeditor.com/editor/

http://www.myspacetoolbox.com/myspace-editor.php

http://www.layoutcodez.net/

(there's probably a hundred more just like these)

[hide]EDIT: if you'd like to steal a particularly sexy MySpace layout, I've just tossed in a little page here to help.
http://ravishu.com/forums/myspace/Layout-copier/
Just enter the MySpace page you want to clone, then copy & paste the code into the Customized section of your profile
This is also handy if you already have a MySpace profile that you like and want to use here at RavishU. 
No need to log in to MySpace and figure out what to copy, the cloner will do that for you.

I've also added a very simple layout generator here: http://ravishu.com/forums/myspace/Layout-editor/[/hide]




Note: a BUNCH of them will add their own little link and note to your profile code.  Fuck 'em.  Copy and paste the stuff into WordPad or NotePad and eliminate anything that looks like this:

Code: [Select]

<a href="http://www.layoutcodez.net" target="_blank" title="piczo layouts">Piczo Layouts</a>or

Code: [Select]

<div style="position:absolute;left:0px;top:0px"><a href="http://www.mstoolbox.com/" target="_self"><img src="http://c.myspace.com/Groups/00018/90/06/18116009_l.gif" border="0" alt="MySpace"/></a></div>unless you really DO want someone else's crap on YOUR profile.    Their advertising code will usually be right at the beginning, although not always.  There's a DIV wrapper around the second example which is frequently used to lock it in place at the top-left corner of your profile.  In that case, nuke the links, images and the DIV wrapper.

If you want to use any CLEAN graphics, you can save them and then upload 'em to TinyPic.com.  For adult graphics, it's probably best to hotlink 'em from somewhere else as TinyPic will delete any 'objectionable' content.  I *think* you can upload 'em as custom PROFILE images and just copy&paste the URL from there... it oughta work for locally-hosted stuff.  WE sure as hell don't care if it's 'adult' oriented! 

If you're having problems, drop me a message or post in the thread; others might be having similar issues.

I see COLOR is missing from the attribute tags... I'll add that in although BE AWARE that the theme may override some of your settings.  Similarly, some people are using light themes, some dark, and the COLOR settings for each theme are designed to make the text readable.  You don't want the same kind of idiotic shit that they had at RC for the longest time with unreadable posts... 

[RopeFiend]

OK, I figured out how to change the MEDIA box so that it allows the 'Auto Embed Video Clips' mod we have.

Put ONLY the URL(s) that you want in that box, and the forum will add the EMBED code around them.  For instance, if you want to embed a Google video, just use this part:
[noembed]http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1561508935667153352&hl=en[/noembed] and not the whole string that you'll find in their embed code.  When you view your profile you'll see this:

 

but when you EDIT it you'll see the URL




Also, don't go wild with adding videos.  With IE, Firefox and Opera your browser will slow down LOTS if you have more than 3 videos per page, and your browser will probably crash if there's more than 12 videos per page.  Blame Macromedia... their SWF applet is a damned memory hog and it doesn't play well with multiple copies of itself.