You've just managed to get through installing SMF and, quite naturally, you're extremely proud of yourself! I'm guessing that, now, you'd like to customize your forum, to change the look and feel of it, in line with its subject matter.
Let's deal with themes.
There are several ways of installing themes. Let's deal with the most common way, here. It's as easy as this:
- I really can't stress this enough. BACKUP! Backup everything, both your forum, itself, and your database. It's very rare that anything would go wrong, with this. But, it's best to be prepared, just in case.
- Download the theme, from the theme site, making sure that the theme is compatible with the version of SMF that you're using. http://custom.simplemachines.org/themes
- Go to the "Themes and layout" section of your SMF admin panel and, at the bottom of the page, you'll see the "Install a New Theme" section. In there, click on "Choose", alongside "From a file". A requester will open, which you can use to navigate to the theme that you downloaded, from the theme site.
- Using that requester, navigate to the theme that you downloaded and click "Install", to the right of that requester.
- Confirm that you want the theme to install, when the alert pops-up.
- Your theme is installed!
Yes, it really is that simple!
Now, as that was successful, it'd be an extremely good idea to... You guessed it... BACKUP! You don't want all that work, wasted, now do you?
As I said, at the beginning, there are other ways of installing themes. If you want to read about those ways, have a look here: Install a New Theme
