Creating a new look for community site
I've been thrown into the middle of developing a new look for my company's community. This is my first exposure to Lithium, I've dealt primarily with Wordpress in the past, and I'm not really a devel...
Forum Discussion
This largely depends on the types of changes you want to implement.
A good starting point is to look at how Lithium structures the HTML - based on the quilt, page layout and component layout. Then look at how the skin CSS is used to change the look and feel. Have a look at how Lithium specifies fonts and colours.
To style the community you use 'skins' - you can have more than one, and the mobile and desktop versions can be configured separately.
You can't change the structure of Lithium's own components, so if CSS can't do what you want, you'll need to start looking into custom components and the REST API.
If you're doing a major overhaul of the community, you'll want to create a new skin. I recommend creating something as blank as possible as a starting point. Once you've got that, work on the overall page structure (header, footer, main contents etc.), followed by the structure of the different page types (forums, blogs etc.). Finally, when you're happy with the structure, you can start to use CSS for the look and feel - again starting with general rules, then getting more specific for different types of pages.
If the changes are big, the chances are you'll be better starting from scratch rather than trying to make incremental changes to the existing skin.
