I don't have much time to spend on this project, but I'm trying to built a customised community site for a friend. I am more than a little familiar with PHP, HTML and CSS so its frustrating trying to customise a CMS like this with no documentation.

First thing I need to do is simply to create a new theme (from scratch) but there is nothing I've found on this site that shows someone how to do it properly.

I imagine a barebones theme with decent commenting would probably be enough to go on. The alternatives are, as far as I can tell, to fiddle with existing themes until I see exactly how they work, or to go through the XOOPS code itself. The former would take several hours which I don't have, the latter would take several weeks which I don't have.

I appreciate you probably get this sort of post all the time, and your probably just as annoyed as I am reading the same newbie rubbish over and over again. I'm perfectly happy to follow any previous threads, just give me something please!

Thanks in advance, Oxygen.

You may want to look at this Faq Page.

And ......This One.

Its 3:45 in the morning here and my brain hasn't been in gear at all today... But I'm slightly confused, I had assumed that the first FAQ page you posted wasn't up to date or was focusing on the default theme as a theme to start from.

"styleMAC.css - some settings only for MAC's
styleNN.css - some settings only for Netscape"

Surely thats not used anymore and surely XOOPS doesn't have to use tables?? - I much prefer advanced CSS. I know its not ideal but I only write for Firefox using the latest techniques.

Scroll down a little further in the First Faq I listed and you get This Link to Incama theme building manual that goes into more advanced methods.