How to change the classic theme radically - adding banners, flash and stuff

[innerflash]

Hey there,

This is my first post here, and believe me, I have looked through the whole forum and found no satisfactory answers.

I work as a webdesigner for a company that has already used Coppermine before, but got frustrated with layout customization. So as I'm taking over the task to build it from scratch again, I would like to know if there is a way to change the CLASSIC THEME radically. I mean really make it look the way I want. CSS and HTML is not a challenge - the challenge here is to create new "{CUSTOM_*WHATEVER*}s" as the CORE code is not present in the 1.4.7 release of the classic theme. As I'm new to it, I have no idea if it ever was available anyway... I have worked a lot with PostNuke and even have installed coppermine before on my own site, but this time customization is crucial.

I need to add banners, flash content and perhaps some html blocks too. I just need to know how to apply it into the theme. If they appear on the sides, top and bottom is fine!

As I know nobody here get's paid to reply to a topic, I can just say that I would really appreciate anyone's advice. You would make the world happier with another dude smiling... 

[innerflash]

Due to my lack of experience with themes, I just assume the CLASSIC theme is the cleanest and easier to customize. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Tranz]

I think you should pick a theme that is closest to what you want to achieve and go from there. Did you read the board's stickies on theming?

[Paver]

You can put a lot of logic and tag-processing in theme.php.  You just need to know what functions and variables Coppermine uses to display all the various elements on a page.

The classic theme.php is empty since it doesn't override any of the default theme functions & variables.  You can look at themes/sample/theme.php for all the theme customizations possible (well nearly all, I've seen two that are not present - for them, look for theme_breadcrumb and theme_create_tabs).  In there, you'll see what information Coppermine provides to each theme function and see how you can use that information for your own purposes.

At the very least, if you're missing some information in some theme function, you can pull it from the database tables directly.

[innerflash]

Thanks tranz and paver.

I managed to do what I wanted with simple html. Keeping it simple isn't easy for me sometimes... Will post the link when the time is nigh!

Cheers