# Solved: Embed forum into website



## techy689 (Jan 9, 2007)

I am creating my first site and was wondering hot to embed my forums into my actual webpage so that users have the same look and feel of the original website. I prefer not to use frames, but I really want to get this to work.

I am using SMF for forums and have a domain with hosting by GoDaddy.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.


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## techy689 (Jan 9, 2007)

anyone?


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## Fyzbo (Feb 6, 2002)

The easiest way is probably to create a theme for the forum engine that looks like your website.

Forums have gotten very complex and to try to wrap your own website around it would take a lot of time.


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

I wholeheartedly agree with Fyzbo on this.

Peace...


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## techy689 (Jan 9, 2007)

any links where i can learn more info?


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

You can look here for SMF themes and if you see one you like, make that the theme of the rest of your website.

Peace...


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## psyon (Nov 29, 2007)

Depends on the forum you're using. Personally I use phpbb, with that you can edit the header/footer files in the template to help integrate it. 

A friend of mine had an anime site with a logo & nav at the top and a more detailed nav to the right... in the header template file I added the logo/nav info (best using php to just do an include) and on the footer I was able to close it up with the right nav and bottom of the site. The template I used for phpbb was not flashy, so the only thing I had to do was tweak some of the colors in the css file to match mine and the integration was smooth. Took a few hours to get it just right because I was dealing with a lot of tables and adding new colums to the layout but it really wasn't too hard.

Your other options I think are to create a template from scratch that matches your site, or redesign your site to match the template or use frames. Creating a new template will take entirely too long and the frames are just ugly. Take a stab at editing your template and use php to minimize your work.


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## Susie N (Mar 22, 2003)

I find punBB very easy to integrate into an existing website. All you have to do is take your header, body container, and footer and add it to the forum template files.


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## techy689 (Jan 9, 2007)

Susie N said:


> I find punBB very easy to integrate into an existing website. All you have to do is take your header, body container, and footer and add it to the forum template files.


thats what i did. created header.php and footer.php and integrated them into the template.

thanks


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