Forum Software Reviews

Want new and shiny icons for your Drupal forum? Follow that guide! For pressed persons, the ZIP file containing the icons is at the end of this article.

As you know, it is not recommend to modify the core package of Drupal, and therefore, you are not supposed to modify the misc/ folder as well. Starting from this point, how could you now modify the images of the thread icons, to let them being more modern? This is what we are going to explain here.

Even if you can't modify the Drupal core files, you can however customize an existing template file that is part of the Drupal Forum module: forum-icon.tpl.php. To customize it, as usual, create this file in your theme folder, and clear the Drupal cache. Now, Drupal will use this new file instead of the default one.

1. Here is the content of the new file, that will relocate the default path of icons:

   forum-icon.tpl.php

    <?php
    // $Id: forum-icon.tpl.php,v 1.3 2007/12/20 09:35:09 goba Exp $
    
    /**
     * @file forum-icon.tpl.php
     * Display an appropriate icon for a forum post.
     *
     * Available variables:
     * - $new_posts: Indicates whether or not the topic contains new posts.
     * - $icon: The icon to display. May be one of 'hot', 'hot-new', 'new',
     *   'default', 'clost', or 'sticky'.
     *
     * @see template_preprocess_forum_icon()
     * @see theme_forum_icon()
     */
    ?>
    <?php 
     $title = $icon;
     if ($title == "default") {
      $title = "post";
     }
    
    ?>
    <img src="<?php print forum_thread_icon_path() . "/forum/forum-$icon.png"; ?>" alt="<?php print $icon; ?>" title="<?php print ucfirst($title); ?>" />

   Note that we also support the title attribute, to let user know the meaning of each icon.

2. As you can see, we have created a new function, called forum_thread_icon_path(), and you now just need to define it to return the folder where you want to store the icons:

   template.php

   function forum_thread_icon_path() {
     return "/sites/default/theme/mytheme/images";
   }

Custom Thread Icons Package

And as promise, here is the archive containing the forum thread icons. Download this file, and put its content to the path you defined in your forum_thread_icon_path() function.

drupal-thread-forum-icons-package.zip

Note that this icons have been designed by Yoroy, and should be present by default in Drupal 7.