Some questions for getting started

I have only just started trying to set up my community, and there are a few things I don't get. Like, how to add pages, how to add a main menu, how to change the contents of the index.php, improve the search box, change what is displayed on profile pages etc.
Simple question - what skills are needed? Do I have to write code? php or simple html?
Are there any people out here I can hire for that job? Are there any people I can hire for coding a skin? I can see that the job section here contains lots more requests than freelancers.
I am trying to decide if this is something I can get into or not.



updated by @rritz: 01/28/15 09:18:48PM

Welcome to Jamroom!

The level of skill required is going to depend on what you're looking to do - if you just want to tweak a few things here and there (i.e. change colors, add a menu item, etc.) then I would say "minimal HTML skills" would be good. If you want a completely custom site from the ground up then I would say advanced HTML and PHP skills would be needed.

1) Adding pages is done by creating a page in the "Page Creator" module, so that part is easy.

2) To customize the index you would customize the skins/SkinName/index.tpl file (HTML template with Smarty tags)

3) Profile page is controlled by the "profile" templates - i.e. skins/SkinName/profile_index.tpl

95% of everything is controlled by templates, so if you know HTML and CSS you can do a lot.

Hope this helps!


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Hi - Welcome to Jamroom
Jamroom will work 'out-of-the-box' as a community site and has several pre-configured skins so that you can pick a style and feel for your website, so it might be that you could be up and running with the minimum of site configuration (just uploading a logo image would make your site unique!!). However, it is likely that you will want to do a bit more than that and some basic HTML and CSS knowledge would be useful so that you can use Jamroom's in-built features to customise further.
I would recommend looking through our documentation and maybe our free video 'getting started' course at https://www.udemy.com/start-your-own-online-community
Hope that helps
Paul


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist