Creating Theme-specific Styles for Advanced Forum

This is a super short post that will (hopefully) make people's lives easier.

On a Drupal 7.x site we're currently working on here at RedBottle, we needed to create a custom Advanced Forum style that matched the site theme we were developing.

Unfortunately, the docs for Advanced Forum are a bit spotty, and we initially thought we had to put the custom style inside the modules/advanced_forum/styles/ folder, which is a huge "no-no" for maintenance reasons. Mainly, if you put a custom style there and then need to update the module, you'll accidentally blow away your custom style, causing the site to jarringly revert to one of the built-in styles. In addition, if you have a multi-site install, putting the style there means that all sites on the install can use the custom theme if the advanced_forum module is in the sites/all/modules folder. That might be desirable, but in most cases it isn't. In short, putting something custom inside a third-party or contrib module is not a good idea.

After reading through the issue queue, there wasn't a lot that explained whether or not custom paths were supported. Eventually, after trying and failing to use some CTools hooks for this, we came across the real answer.

The answer is to follow the steps described under "Telling Advanced Forum about your style" in the following handbook page:
http://drupal.org/node/512116

Credit goes to this thread for the answer:
http://drupal.org/node/1363536