Customising the layout of group pages

Apologies if this has already been answered - I tried searching the forums before I wrote this, but couldn't find what I was looking for. 

I'm new to Elgg and am working with the latest version (1.8.3). What I would like to do is alter the layout of Group pages so that more emphasis is placed on the Discussion area, while Pages and Files are moved further down the page, as they are not so important for my project. In fact, the Group page layout used in this site is closer to what I'm trying to achieve than the default layout. 

Which files do I need to edit to change the layout? I've had a look around my install, but I'm unfamiliar with Elgg, so it's not obvious. 

Thanks. 

  • In case anybody else is struggling with this - I've made some progress. I figured out that I'd need to take a look at the views folder in the groups plugin, but I'm not a developer and was expecting it to be relatively straight-forward, like tweaking a Wordpress template - it does not appear to be that simple. 

    While I'm trying to figure out how to fully customise the look of a group page, I've settled on a temporary solution - this plugin allows you to use widgets on group pages, which at least gives you a little more control over the layout.

  • Hey Lancey, I'm experiencing the same difficulties as you. Thought altering the groups layout would be easy.  Not the same.

  • the way 1.8 is designed is that specific CSS is only called when you're on a specific page like groups for example. instead of having the CSS for groups in one single global CSS file, it's only called once ;) this is why 1.8 is faster than 1.7. at least this is from my point of view.

  • the way 1.8 is designed is that specific CSS is only called when you're on a specific page like groups for example

    This is false for the most part, individual views can call a css include - usually for specific things like jquery modules that require css where it doesn't make sense to aggregate that into the main css.

    For the most part all of the individual css.php files you see get aggregated into the global css much the same as they did in 1.7

  • thanks for the clarification, i've been gone fishing in alaska for a while now and i wasn't around to see elgg 1.8 being released. yes the css.php for a plugin is integrated into the global css which is true but there are special lines of code to include a specific css into a view which is what i like about 1.8

Beginning Developers

Beginning Developers

This space is for newcomers, who wish to build a new plugin or to customize an existing one to their liking