New guy needing help with themes.

reef51 · New Member Joined: Jul 11, 2009 Posts: 5

Hello there, I am very new to the entire RN/nuke way of life, and was wondering if there was some sort of tutorial on converting themes over to RN. All of the themes provided are good, but none jump out at me saying "This is the one."
Are there specific versions of themes I should look for, or can any nuke based theme be converted?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

nuken · Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 6:01 pm

PHP Nuke themes are not hard to convert for RavenNuke. You can see what over 700 of them look like on RavenNuke(tm) at

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. Many sites have new themes for RavenNuke(tm) that are designed to work without changes. One really good site with a large selection of free and paid themes is clanthemes.com. Here is a link to their free themes.

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Palbin · Posted: Sun Dec 06, 2009 6:28 pm

Usually the only thing you need to worry about when using a theme that was not meant specifically for RN are some forum templates. They are simple to add since you can just copy them form any other theme. There may be some other minor things, but if you post here with any problems I'm sure we can solve them pretty quick.

reef51 · New Member Joined: Jul 11, 2009 Posts: 5

Thx, I will check them out.

fkelly · Posted: Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:34 am

One thing to look at with converting themes is whether they produce valid html. You can use the w3c validator at:

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or even better you can get the Firefox HTML Validator add on. Somewhere way back in the history of *nuke themes someone produced a horrible theme where tables and rows and table elements were not properly opened and closed, image tags didn't have alts, html codes weren't lowercase and many other violations of proper formatting (perhaps it was before there were standards?). Then a bunch of other people copied that theme and modified it while retaining the non-compliant code. So, if you take a theme sort of at random you need to see how compliant it is and how hard it is to fix as a first step or you run the risk of getting yourself into a lot more work than you'd anticipate. Note that the NUMBER of errors the validator generates is not a complete measure of what you are getting into since a single error can cascade into dozens of errors but running the validator and looking carefully over the code to see what needs fixing can give you a general idea.