Question Different Template in Specific Forum Categories?

I recently upgraded to Kunena 1.6 from Kunena 1.5 and am loving the changes! It is a night and day difference and the performance is incredible!

One new feature I am working on adding to my site is a separate discussion area. I want to associate a particular Kunena Forum Category with this discussion area. I want this category to use its own theme, so I can customize it to fit with the discussion. Is it possible to somehow specify that when a user clicks on a particular forum category or views a topic in that category, it loads a different theme than the default?

Thanks!

G'day, Garibaldi, and thank you for the complimentary remarks about K 1.6.

I'm not sure that what you are asking is easily achieved but I believe that it should be possible to have different templates for specific categories.

One of the changes introduced in K 1.6 was the means of being able to "colour-code" different categories; you will see evidence of this feature here, at www.kunena.org . The Playground category is one such example.

Another change that was introduced in K 1.6 was the ability to customise Joomla's menus so that you could, in effect, separate one Kunena installation into several discrete parts. I'm not sure if the idea can be extended further, but it is certain that you could associate different Joomla site templates to each of these Kunena menu assignments. Combining this idea with the "skinner" feature, you could then apply the site template "theme" to your forum.

I hope I've given you a couple of ideas that you can experiment with. I think we'll all be very interested to see what progress you make. Good luck.

Cheers

Hi sozzled,

Thanks for the quick and helpful reply! I am not sure I will be able to achieve the desired effect with the skinner template. The reason why I want to apply a different theme is so I can hide parts of the forum - e.g. breadcrumbs and navigation - when that specific category is displayed so users can use it for this new site area without it seeming like the whole forum. Right now I have it working (mostly) by setting a PHP $_SESSION variable and then checking for that variable in my kunena install. Unfortunately the problem with this approach is I don't know how to clear the variable when a user opens the normal forum page. Any ideas?

Thanks!

As I hinted earlier, we're entering uncharted territory at the moment.

What I would like to suggest you do is see how the Playground feature was built here, combine the technique with different site templates and the use of "skinner", to see if this has some application in your case. Further information about how the Playground feature was constructed is at Multiple forums on one Joomla . It might help.

I don't have any other ideas at this time to get you started. Perhaps someone else does.

I had another idea today - is there a way for me to get the category ID of the category being loaded in Kunena? Maybe doing this I could then check if the ID matches the one I want to put in this other area and then I could trigger the template modifications. The only trick is I would need to be able to detect the category ID before the Joomla page starts to load because I want to set $_REQUEST to 'component' so it only loads the forum and not the surrounding Joomla template too.