Automatic detection of the forum engine. Themes and Russification of the SMF forum, as well as installation of the JFusion component in Joomla Themes and installation of the Russian language pack

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. So, we continue the topic of setting up the forum engine called SMF, which we started in the post about it. There we have not yet made the forum Russian, in terms of translation from the English interface. At the moment it does not look very presentable, but after Russification (if it has not already been done) and the creation of the appropriate sections, its appearance will improve significantly.

Today we will look at the design themes and make it Russian, and also install the JFusion component, which can work with both engines (Jumla and SMF), which will allow us to have a common user base for two and only one form for their registration and login.

Themes and installation of the Russian language pack

The Simple Machines Forum engine supports the ability to change themes, and they can be changed both for the entire forum and for its individual sections in particular. Personally, I used the default theme, but made quite a lot of changes to it manually. In particular, I changed the background, the colors of some elements, added a clock on a flash drive, a radio and much more, which I will talk about in subsequent posts in this section.

Why didn't I use any of the additional themes when creating the forum? Well, it's probably all about my laziness. No, I was not lazy to search and download new themes, fortunately there are many places where this can be done. My laziness lies elsewhere.

The fact is that the whole variety of mods for this engine, designed to expand its capabilities, is focused specifically on the default theme. Let me explain. If you have a default theme, then adding a mod to SMF takes place in a matter of seconds and, as a rule, does not require manual editing of the code.

If you install a mod with a design theme different from the default one, you will need, as they say, to process all the raw parts with a file. In other words, you will have to use FileZilla (download and configure it; you can access the site via FTP and open for editing the files of your forum engine, which this mod makes changes to.

Then look for the right place in the code and perform the necessary actions: either replacing the code, or deleting, or adding a section of code before or after the required fragment. If you consider that there may be about a dozen files to which changes will need to be made, then you can imagine how troublesome it will be to do this. In this case, you need to be very careful and not make mistakes, because otherwise the forum may not open at all.

If all the above problems of using a non-default theme do not scare you, then you can download them from here. The themes there are sorted into sections (minimalism, close to classical, modern, etc.) and for each of them you can see a screenshot of it in full screen. I’ll tell you how to install these same themes a little later.

If you did not Russify the forum at the stage of uploading the engine files to the hosting, as was described in the first part of this opus (see the link at the very beginning of the article), then you can do it now. The Russian language pack with the required one, previously downloaded from this page, needs to be unpacked, and then copied the Themes folder to the root folder, where there is already a directory with the same name.

After copying is complete, you need to log into the forum using the administrator username and password. Select “Admin” in the top menu, and then click “Server Settings” in the left column.

In the window that opens, find the “Default Forum Language” item and select the Russian language from the drop-down list, and then click on the “Save” button at the bottom of the page.

That's it, now your conference is completely in Russian.

Solving problems when installing mods that do not support the Russian language

Please note that in the future, when adding mods to SMF that do not have a Russian translation, you may sometimes have a problem with displaying the mod settings in the admin panel. Actually, these same settings will simply not be visible in the admin panel, because... there will be no Russification files for them. Therefore, you will have two options to solve this problem.

The first way is to switch to English for the entire forum. You can see how this can be done a few paragraphs above. Accordingly, after you perform the necessary actions with these settings, you will need to return to Russian again.

The second method is more complicated, but it will allow us to see the settings of installed mods in the admin panel always, and not only when the English language is activated. I dwell on this point in such detail because the question that someone installed a mod and cannot find its settings in the admin panel of their conference is a very common one.

So, the second method is to add translation strings to the Russification files for the newly added mods. I’ll tell you later how to determine which Russification files need to be changed and where to get them. In the meantime, temporarily, you can use the first method.

Installing JFusion for website and forum integration

First you will need to download JFusion and its Russification. Having entered the Joomla admin panel, we perform standard actions: select from the top menu of the admin panel the items “Extensions” - “Install/Uninstall” - “Download package file” - the “Browse” button - find the file with the component jfusion_package.zip on your computer - click on the button “ Upload file&Install>".

After this, a window appears informing you that the component was installed successfully. If problems arise, you can familiarize yourself with solutions to some of them at the link given just above.

Now it’s time for Russification, which is added in exactly the same way as the component itself. Those. repeat the sequence of actions: “Extensions” - “Install/Uninstall” - “Download package file” - “Browse” button - find the JFusion Russification file on your computer - click on the “Download file & Install” button. Now we can go to the settings along the path “Components” - “JFusion” and make sure that Russification has been successfully added and is working.