[@chrishajer Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

No.

Kakumei is a theme (WordPress terminology) or a template (bbPress terminology) and controls the display of the content on your site. Any modifications you make to your site should be done in these template files, never in the core. Changing core files makes it hard to upgrade to newer releases: you lose your changes with every upgrade. So, if you make the changes in a template file, you can maintain them between releases.

Also, by default, the stock kakumei theme is used and it’s in the bb-templates directory. I recommend creating a new directory called my-templates (if it’s not there already) at the same level as bb-templates. So, in a directory listing, they’d be at the same level. Then, inside there, create a directory called mytheme or some other name that is descriptive for your forum. This directory name does not matter. (The my-templates one DOES matter.)

Now that you have a my-templates directory, and inside that a new directory with a name you choose, copy everything from inside the bb-templates/kakumei/ directory to this new directory you created. Then, open up style.css and change the header to give this new template a unique name on line two. You will see this there:

Theme Name: Kakumei

Change that to “Theme Name: My Cool New Theme” or whatever you want. Then refresh your admin panel, and you will see a new theme. You can change the rest of the lines in that header as well, to things that are meaningful to you. Be sure not to modify the text before the colon, just change the text after, to your values.

Now, modify the php and css files in this directory to change the look of your forum. You can switch back and forth between themes here. If you break something, just choose the default theme until you fix the one you were working on.