Theme fixes

What if you're unhappy with the way CiviCRM forms look on the front-end of your website?

First of all, remember that you don't have to make everything look “just so.” There's no rule requiring it.

But say you have a sound business case for investing a little effort and changing the look of those front end CiviCRM forms.

Here are two ways to make that easier for your developer — or whoever is going to make these changes:

Custom template:

Sometimes a WordPress theme will do all kinds of unexpected things in the default template that goof up CiviCRM's content.

Usually, the symptoms are that CiviCRM's content doesn't display at all, or it displays in the wrong place on the page.

A common solution is to create a template that avoids all that fancy logic and just shows the CiviCRM stuff where it's supposed to be.

Remove conflicting styles:

By default, CiviCRM adds its own styles to the content it generates, but that can conflict with the styles of your site theme. As long as you have both styles fighting each other, it can be hard to formulate the style rules that will give you the formatting you want.

Under WordPress, you can do that pretty easily, using a setting in the WordPress plugin CiviCRM Admin Tools.

Under Drupal, there's no module that does this with a simple check box setting like that. But your Drupal theme developer should easily be able to prevent the stylesheet from being loaded, by using Drupal hooks in the theme.

All the best,
A.