I was *so* hoping that they changed the style system in vB4. They didn't. Ugh.
 

Unfortunately it looks like they kept the same system in place, and it's beyond me why everything is so separated into a million tiny different locations. It takes *forever* to build a fully functioning custom theme because of it.

I was really hoping for something more like Wordpress this time around. 1 or 2 css files max, and all of the template files editable within a textarea format.

It seems like the system they have and have had in place now is way unnecessarily complex.

Am I alone in this thinking or? If I'm wrong about this, then I encourage someone to provide an explanation of how this system is good. I'll be the first to admit if I'm wrong or "didn't think of that" ;)

I'm kinda diggin a lot. Really enjoying the challenge of figuring out what is what.

Been trying to figure out for a little bit why when I black out postbit_background and then hover over the area it turns white...

Yeah, it's hard, its a challenge, but more importantly.... it's very fun!!!

I say keep it. Once those of us spending the time learning figure it out.. Maybe some nice skins will be released.

I Also am really keen to get stuck in and have made great progress so far. Yes I find some of the stylevar variables confusing as they don't really relate at first glance, but its great to have gone to the next level in coding.

have you had any luck in figuring out how to kill that hover to white issue? I have spent hours trying to figure it out
I guess its something really simple but alas it has eluded me :confused:

The style system has changed quite a bit, and some of those changes will allow the use of less templates in the future - however, those changes will only happen over time.

I agree with you, the system needs a lot of work. I was also hoping for something like Wordpress but they created this one where everything is scattered over a thousand places. The style manager Main CSS page is useless - not even sure why it's on 4.0 since you can't control anything on the style from there. It just causes confusion and is unnecessary.

It's there right now so admins can see what colors/backgrounds/settings they had on their old style and can copy/paste these colors/settings into the new stylevars for the new style.

Its tedious at first sight. But after playing around with it for the past week, it gets alot easier to use. Spend 1 week struggling, and the rest for vb4.0 it will be easy.

I dig it. I totally customized my websites theme from scratch to look almost exactly like the old one I had.

Anyone got an answer for how to get rid of this? or what the stylevar is for it?

Also, yeah, I do understand that this is easier to work off as we go from previous versions of vb to vb4 and yes there are a few more flexible things there.

There are also a few restrictive things that I have had to edit templates to get around
but I had to do that in previous versions as well so not much of a stress

If your talking about the White hover over the navbits/breadcrumb section, the stylevar to change it is the "lightweightbox_background". Took me a while to find that one as well :)

I just hope it doesn't stay ugly.

It's been 2 years (?) since phpbb launch their css based style system. Go to their template section and what do you see? All the templates look the same. Sure forcing people to style with css is nice, but it's alteast 10x harder. You could probably be looking at 1000+ lines worth of CSS code and all the major web browsers to make sure they alteast look alright.

It'll be a whole year or two before we even see "unique" looking templates like you did with vb3.

I agree man...should have done better with the template system.

The idea is to avoid modifying templates at all... hence the CSS.

I'd rather write a 1000 line stylesheet than have to edit 50 templates and deal with them every time I upgrade. If you are good at web design, CSS shouldn't be a problem. If they make it easier for designers to make styles (which it will), then it will help increase the number of quality styles being released.

You're going to get crappy styles no matter what the forum system is. I'm much more interested in having the tools to actually create the better ones without having to hack at the templates and code too much. It's going to take a while... all of the documentation isn't even done yet, nor is vB4 even stable yet.

Also, remember that we are still in a transitional state. The templates will start to be combined as development time allows, because we can get rid of most of the 'bit' templates by using loops in templates now.