for v4 or v5 because they would take a slightly different approach to explain? V4 already has a tutorial where you pick up the code. So long as you know how tables, divs, and classes work (which you would if you know how to code everything else about a skin) myo and byo mods aren't hard at all to figure out?

custom myo explanation
custom byo explanation

... there's a avatar class in the v5 stylesheet? lol. i had no problem editing around it.

the classes in most of the coding isn't necessary, i actually deleted a lot of it and found out as long as the $[whatever] attributes are still there they'll work.

and btw, op-kat, all the attributes are on the side and pretty self explanatory. like, i think some are user, username, user.ahref, y'know that's easy to figure out what it might do. just letting you know. <:

BYO is slightly easier to explain, so I'll do that now. Idk if I'll ever find time to get around to MYO. If you can understand BYO, MYO is basically the same idea though.

Do you have the BYO code? Copy and paste it into the BOTTOM of your global footer. BYO is one of those placement sensitive codes. Let's just say it ain't gonna cooperate if it doesn't get to be the bottom bitch.

You don't touch this code. Don't really worry about it. Just paste it into the footers.



Below is the code you ARE gonna touch. Copy and paste it wherever (custom dictates it goes ABOVE the above script, but it actually shouldn't matter.)



FYI: There's also a different span tag for guest profiles. It's the same as above except instead of saying "mini_profile_member", it says "mini_profile_guest".

Within those span tags, you put ALL the code for your mini profile design. (Basically, the way BYO works is that whenever a mini profile is supposed to show up, instead of showing the default fuggers mini profile, BYO plugs in whatever you put between those span tags.)

It's not expressly necessary, but I suggest making a general container for your miniprofile stuff. You can use tables, but I'm using a div.



So there's a centered div. It's called miniprofile, and we'll worry about its properties later.

Okay, now this is your paradigm. It's what you'll use for every item (eg, stuff like the post count, member rank, etc) you want in the miniprofile. Live it, learn it, love it:



There's a bunch of options for applying CSS to your miniprofile. Personally, I just tack on a class, so it looks like this:



For example, we're doing this:



Okay, so that's the user_name item, which does exactly what it sounds like, and it's labeled with the "mininame" class, which we'll create in a bit. Wherever you put the above code is where the person's display name will show up.

Here's a list of useful items, they're all exactly what they sound like.
- user_name
- rank
- custom_title
- avatar
- personal_text
- posts
- money

Basically you just lump items one after another. Below, I've mostly just given each one a class, so I can define each one individually in CSS. The exception is "ministuff" which is itself being used as a container for the post and money values, because I figured I may as well stick them together.



You want to code the framework, basically. I didn't have a complicated design. It's legit just display name, title, then the avatar, then personal text, then the ever relevant post/money info, all showing up one right after the other.

So now we're gonna stick in the CSS code for these classes, because right now it still looks like jackshit. You can put the CSS anywhere in the global header/footers, doesn't matter where as long as it's somewhere. (I write code like an idiot, so I like to have it right next to the span tags, where I can easily fudge with them both at the same time.)

Idk if you're familiar with CSS. You can google up CSS tutorials elsewhere. Here's some CSS stuff.



The "miniprofile" class is effectively the background of the miniprofile. Everything will show up within/on top of it, so I gave it a background pattern and a bit of padding.

The rest is just text, so I've styled them with slightly different appearances. Notice that I didn't bother giving the item "avatar" a class. You can, but I didn't want/need to.

You can get crazy with CSS. Add more background patterns, fonts, colors, rounded corners, borders--whatever you want, really. The CSS is where most of the real prettifying work is done. The stuff within the span tags is just the framework.

The end result should look something (but not exactly--the code isn't quite the same) like this:



(Er, if it doesn't look like the above, then I fucked up somewhere. Sorry. I haven't tested it out.)

Obviously, it's a pretty simple BYO profile. I don't really have any advice for a non-simple profile. Just draw up a design and do your best to code it.

In all honesty, it seriously doesn't matter where the CSS goes. It also doesn't matter how many sections of CSS you have. As long as it's within the html SOMEWHERE, all your styles will be recognized and implemented onto the page.

HOWEVER, yeah, it's professional and/or custom to have all your CSS together in one chunk of <style> tags, and you'll want to put it as high up as possible. In fact, it's <i>supposed</i> to go in the <head> tag, which you don't even get access to in v4. So put it at the top of the global headers.

As a general rule, you'll at least want to have your CSS coding show up ABOVE whatever html code (eg, the framework) that it stylizes. That's because the code is loaded from top to bottom, and back when we were all using crappy dial-up, pages loaded super slowly. If you have CSS below the stuff it stylizes, then the stuff will show up un-CSS'd at first until the page finishes loading. For most people on non crapass internet, it doesn't much matter.

Are you using BYO with v5? It's unnecessary--BYO's basically built into v5. However, you can't really tack on a class for each item like I did above. The items are named stuff like $[user], $[user.avatar], $[user.posts], etc. Since there's no <span> stuff to tack a class onto, you just use containers instead, so:



And put the CSS in the forum wrappers in v5, somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. As said, you can put it anywhere, and when I'm editing v5, I stick it in the miniprofile template while I work, but in the end, I move it to the forum wrapper. That's because EVERY SINGLE TIME a miniprofile shows up, the entire template is plugged in--so on a thread page, you'll get the CSS replayed like 20 times, once per post. You can't see a difference, but for the sake of quicker loadtimes, best not to spam up your html with repeated code.