I'm hoping to build a vanilla theme to fit my forums into the design of a site I'm working on. I've tried plugging my site's HTML layout into the master.design.tpl file in the "views" folder and then filling in what I thought were the required {asset name="XXXXXX"} tags to fill in the forum components, but I got a bonk error upon testing, and I am obviously missing something.
Being very new to PHP, is there a quick and simple guide to know what I need to add to my existing HTML to get the forum components to work? Or are there any good guides out there to get me started in Vanilla theming?
I just finished writing my own theme for my site and I just leaned heavenly on existing themes. I wrote the css from scratch, but the php parts I got by looking at other themes and then adapting to my needs.
In particular, I found the joie theme to be insightful. It changes up the layout a little to give you an idea of how exactly you would do that.
The other option is to find a theme you like and literally start with it and make tweaks along the way as needed.