change background colour of anagram theme

Worker Joined: Dec 01, 2008 Posts: 180

Dear sir or madam,

Can someone please advice me.
I am having difficulty in being able to change to the background from white to either another colour or image.

I have gone through the theme.php file over and over again and can not quite get nothing to work.
I have been able to change all tables, blocks, header and footer with ease, but still i have a white background, which for my style is too plain.

Can someone please provide me with assistance, i am using the anagram theme, and have changed every instance of where colours are indicated, or where an image is, and still nothing i do seems to change the background from the white colour it is.

It would really be appreciated if someone could please advice me.

Thankyou sincerely.

Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2008 11:59 pm

Suggest changing either the BODY tag directly or within your style.css

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 10:23 am

Thankyou for your response, but it seems i still am confused to how this can be done.
You say within my style.css file, but the body tag in that file, is written for fontage only, for instance:

body {font-family: tahoma, verdana, helvetica, geneva, arial; font-size: 11px}

This means the is no colour tag to change background whatsoever, and i really can not find it in my theme.php, nothings changing.

I am using the last raven nuke program with the anagram theme; i can change width and height of all the tables to this theme, but still i can not figure out where to change the background colour to the whole theme.

Do you know where in the majority of everyones theme file for the anagram theme, where this ability can be found, because it seems to me it definately is not in the style.css file.

Please can you help me further.

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 11:10 am

I am not seeing white as the background color for this theme. Many of these themes are really a set of nested tables. The encompassing table is set in the header function and has a bgcolor of 'eeeeee'.

Code:

   global $new_topic;


   echo '<br />'


      .'<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="10" width="780" border="0" align="center" bgcolor="#eeeeee">'

from around line 113 of the rn2.30 distribution theme.php for anagram.

Individual news items in themeindex.php have their own colors set. Those look to be white to me. You can fool around with these tables if you want, just be aware that with nested tables like this you can easily wind up with unreadable text unless the text colors are chosen in conjunction with the background.

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 1:23 pm

Or try this. Go into the style.css file in anagram. For the body class try something like this:

Code:

body {font-family: tahoma, verdana, helvetica, geneva, arial; font-size: 11px; background-color: #363636}

That will make area surrounding the tables a darker color. Not sure this is what you are looking for. Remember to clear private data when changing style files or you will likely not see your changes. Of course you can try colors other than 363636.

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 2:07 pm

You need to do what fkelly has suggested. There is no background colour defined at the moment so it just defaults to white. If you want to use an image you can add something like:

Code:

background: url(../images/bkgrd.gif)

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 7:42 pm

Thankyou fkelly and jakec, you have hit it correct, the background colour is controlled by the style.css file, but is not added in beforehand.

I have noticed alot of questioning upon the internet regarding the same question about the anagram theme and changing the background colour, but no-one has gave me the correct solution so far, until now thanks to you both.

I think background colour should be placed into the anagram theme style.css file, even if default is #FFFFFF, to stop any difficulty any more, i am sure not everyone wants a white background, and the internet shows there are many questions where that is, and without it being there to begin with, how do individuals like myself even know how to input our own colour codes in.
I knew and understood precisely that background colour was related to the body tag, but with the way the anagram theme is designed it makes it impossible to change colour or add image as background.

Thanks to both of you for making this possible for myself and i hope other anagram theme users can now also easily know what to do, `when they just do not want a white background`.

Thankyou.

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 7:48 pm

Sorry forgot to say thankyou to evaders aswel, have not forgot you.
Thankyou your all right, it was just additional code that were not there to begin with.

Better learnt for next time anagram users and theme developers. :clap:

Posted: Tue Dec 02, 2008 8:13 pm

Your courtesy is appreciated pureliving. There are many issues such as the ones you have mentioned with the current themes. Just changing the image that is shown in as the logo for a site is unnecessarily complicated and has to be repeated across every theme you want to use ... sometimes with slight variations in approach from theme to theme (just for example). The RN team is looking at approaches to remedying these problems on a more systematic basis, probably based on stylesheets, but it is not easy to move forward while retaining compatibility of any sort with the current set of themes.

That's a topic for other threads though.