Our Pics And Blog Grid looks better then Forum Grid

[Ocean West]

Can we get some love on this area that view is useless as most of the forums names are truncated. 

[The Old Man]

Hi Ocean West,

The Grid Layout for forums is a bit dull. I checked and Opentype has a great looking template but it's for Pages topic blocks, not Forums.

However, this may help, I did this for my site some time back, it makes use of the ability to place an uploaded image attachment into and at the top of your forum description.

 

If you do that it works but the image doesn't fill the container, so I tweak it a bit:

 

Step 1 - Edit the relevant template

I'd recommend using a child theme or custom parent theme for this, don't edit the original default IPS theme:

Edit line 73 of your theme template forums > front > index > forumGridItem

<div class='ipsPad'>

to this:

<div class='ipsPad cForumGridGSdescription'>

 

Step 2 - Custom CSS

Add some extra CSS to override via your theme's custom.css file:

/* Reduce size of font so forum names show more words in grid view and optionally make bold */
.cForumGrid_title {
  font-size: 16px;
  font-weight: 700;
}
/* Display forum description img attachment full width of grid block in grid view */
.cForumGridGSdescription img {
    display: block;
    position: relative;
    top: -1;
    left: -1;
    min-width: 111%;
	min-height: 150px;
    border: 0 none;
    margin: -15px 2px 0 -15px;
    padding: 0;
}

 

Step 3 - Improve Truncated Forum Titles

You can remove the rather fugly truncated forum title by editing line 43 of the same template as above forums > front > index > forumGridItem and removing the truncate CSS styles, so from this:

<h3 class='ipsType_reset ipsType_sectionHead ipsTruncate ipsTruncate_line cForumGrid_title'>

to this:

<h3 class='ipsType_reset ipsType_sectionHead cForumGrid_title'>

which looks then looks something similar to this...

Hope this helps!

[Ocean West]

@The Old Man Thank you kindly, that is far better then it was. I don't have images in the descriptions but may look at that at some point.

 

i even added a <br> so that each subform doesn't wrap.

 

[The Old Man]

No worries, at least you know where to look. Hope the forum grid is improved in 4.4, but not tried it yet.