lost in VB4 templates. is there any help out there?

[Mutt]

I admit it. I have no clue what's going on in the VB4 templates. ever the simplest edits are driving me nuts. I handled the changes from vb2.3 to vb 3.5 w/ ease. within a weekend I was writing scripts & plugins. the new template vars & syntax were easy enough to follow. but the jump from 3.8 to 4.0, it's like I never looked at html before.

Please tell me there's an article or something which I just haven't found that explains how the hell these new templates work & where I should be going to make edits.

for example, there's no <td> tags. they are all div's or something else w/ a class tag which magically transforms everything. I'm trying to make what I expected to simple little changes to forumhome_forumbit_level2_post and it's like I've never edited a template before. I can see that
<div class="foruminfo td">
is what makes a table row w/ 3 or so columns for the status icon, the forum name & description, & the thread stats. i can see that each div inside it is another <td> of the row but deleting the td doesn't delete the column. it just leave an empty space there. adding a div doesn't make another column. I tried making a table go the full width of the row but it's like i'm trapped inside a table <td> i don't see.

i'm just so aggravated. I get this is all stylesheet stuff that I need to learn but could someone please point me in the right direction. over the years i've taught myself how to script thru looking at examples & trial & error but w/ this i don't even know where to look for the settings. i've dug all thru the style var editor & the template editor. I swear i'm not as dense as I'm coming off. I was doing really well w/ 3.8.

please, can someone tell me where to look for help or point me to an article. something. once i get thru a couple decent edits I know I'll be fine.

thanks in advance. I'm excited to start playing w/ 4 but if I can't make a template set that looks like my site, i'm stuck before I even get started.

[Lynne]

It sounds like what you need to do is read up on CSS. The vB4 templates are just using CSS to style the page, that's all. CSS has been around for quite a while now. There are some excellent sites out there to help you learn it. (I love w3schools.com)

[Attitude5ire]

Start with a Visual directory available at vbulletin.com
Visual Directory fo Stylevars (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entry.php?2398-StyleVar-Visual-Dictionary-for-Forum-Blog-and-CMS-%28PDF-Documents%29)

[vijayninel]

vB4 is for CSS and XHTML purists. Using the barbaric HTML <td> tags is blasphemy.

[TigerC10]

Personally I don't like using CSS because of the various ways that different browsers render CSS (some do it right, some don't - both Firefox and Internet Explorer are guilty of extending the CSS standards for browser specific things). You know how many times I've seen the words "moz-" in the CSS somewhere? Too many. Why should the code go out of its way to render properly for a client when it's the client at fault? Furthermore CSS is constantly evolving... I was programming CSS2 for about a year when they said, "hey look! it's CSS3!!". It's not like javascript where everything renders the same way - always - and the coding standards haven't changed in 10+ years.

Besides that, there's something to be said about achieving an HTML 1.0 compliance. It's like a badge of honor since you know your website will render properly no matter what (despite how boring it may be).

Anyway... Yeah. CSS is what you need to learn about, Mutt. If you're not familiar with that, then you're not going to know what's going on with the styles. vBulletin 3.x had CSS support too - and if you ever downloaded styles then you should have been able to see it on some level. However the coding standards have changed... There's nothing wrong with using <table> tags or those tags associated with them - as long as they're used properly for showing data that belongs in a table (NOT for layout purposes). Otherwise <div> should be used.

[Mutt]

thanks all

in vb3, the CSS was simple & I liked it. even if I didn't get it, I could always ignore it & hard core what I wanted. with vb4 it's at a whole other level. i'll check out the stylevar visual dictionary, actually start using topstyle, & checkout http://w3schools.com/

thanks again.

--------------- Added 1270655310 at 1270655310 ---------------

AHHAHAH!!!

I just saw the "CSS templates" in the template manager. now it's so much clearer. i spent a whole day trying to figure out where all these style sheet settings were. looking at "forumbits.css" I can see what's happening & what I need to do to make my edits. it's like someone turned on the lights.