Template doc's
 

im not sure if this as been done before but i think its a good idea so i started on it.

what im looking to do is explain what every (stock) template in vbulletin dose, hopefully included a screen shot of each. i think this would make it easy on newbie admins. i also hope to lay it out like the admin cp template editor.


so sould i finish it? :)

Sure :) - Although there are a great deal of templates you would have to document ;).

ive done it for ubb before ;).

i say go for it I would be interested in it!

and me... its gon take u a long time tho...

btw ive always wondered what post[firstnewinsert] does in the postbit - not sure if its spelt right :D

looks like this project is ganna be put off awhile, we are currently int he middle of scripting our vbulletin to use a oracle DB backend. ill bring this thread back up when i have time for this again.

Shame, as I'm struggling with my first attempt.

I hate to say this, but the template system for VB has to be the worse I have ever seen. It's almost impossible to make sense of it, because of the shear amount of files. I still haven't been able to figure out quite a bit of it, and am just running around in circles wasting a lot of time experimenting, trying to get a simple design to work properly the way I want it to look.

Needless to say, a guide that explains what each template does would help, as after attempting my own code, I now can understand why there's a lot more styles for other forums out there than VB. Jeez, why couldn't they have made this simplier?

Hopefully, you can resume work, and do up a guide, especially for the graphic end. I'm having a lot of problems trying to find where to put the code to add a image to the bottom of the home and category listing pages, though the postbit is fine, as it's all on one template.

vBulletin has one of the more complete, more useable template systems over other boards. There is not much that you cannot edit with the current template system (although it is supposed to change with the release of vB 3); it will only get better ;).

Yeah, after counting the amount of template files, I can believe you there. :)

Actually, this is a case of a coder gone mad I think. Just looking at a lot of these, where there's a few templates with just one or two lines of code in them. Other templates are just part of a page, and I wish they had named the templates a little better. I guess master PHP coders may understand them, but certainly not me. You had a example of changing the breadcrumb nav from the text ">" to a image, but I just went through the templates, and to match that you have to change at least 10 other templates so you have a consistant look on all your pages.

I do PHP-Nuke themes, it's a very basic, simple system, you can change the codes for the header, footer, blocks, main table content block, news headlines and news articles, If you know what you are doing, you can have separate right blocks, and additional code. Once I finish a design, it takes me about half a hour to code it all in complete, before i debug. It's all on one page, or you can insert html files and have everything set up as separate pages.

I use it more for a template wrap than anything, but despite it's simplicity, it's still a very easy system to use, yet has some very powerful template capabilities. Just about anyone with basic HTML/PHP experience can use it, without needed a tutorial to explain everything.

VB on the other hand....

Just a opinion, but software can only be as good as the people that use it, but it doesn't help when only a small handful of those people have the skill and knowledge in all areas to use it properly. I always believed that truly great software should be easy to learn and to use by everyone.

I hope with V3 that they make the ability to change the templates a lot better, and a lot simplier, but I think they will only make it more confusing than it is now.

A suggestion is a new section that details the templates, and where to add code to them for the various graphics. I've notice quite a few posts asking the same questions, so maybe just having one section in this forum would be the best, and I can finish my theme design as well. :)

Shiva,

I'm sure that this has grown as the vB system itself has grown. I know it's confusing and somewhat overwhelming, but I like the fact that there are so many temlates because that allows more flexiblity.

I do know that they are re-vamping most of vB for 3.0, so perhaps they will have a simplier system. I just hope we don't loose any flexibility along the way. :)

Actually, though my coding skills are limited, I'm looking at this, and don't see any reason why there should be more than 6 or 7 templates. I noticed that a bit of it pointed to another file, that had one line in that template. It's struff like that that really drives me nuts.

I grabbed the pdf file, that explains the setup, and it's a sorry sign that the pdf had so many pages. It also was just as confusing in parts as the template. Guess I'm not smart enough for this, so guess I will stick with what I did before, and spend my spare time studing VBulletin.

Since I have a empty FAQ section, maybe I will put up cole notes on VB Templates, as the problem is there's so many templates, I lose track of what I did before. :(

I hope they revamp VB3, be interesting to see it when ever it comes out.

Shiva, please don't think that I'm being a PITA, but I just wanted to continue my thoughts a bit further. I respect your opinion and from your point of view, I think I would have to agree with you on all points. However, I'm looking at this from a different point of view. :)

I've built quite a few community web sites over the past five years and along the way I've looked at a lot of tools to help make my job easier. One of the tools I looked at was PHPNuke. The thing I didn't like about it was that all the web sites using it looked the same. Granted, I didn't explore it to the n'th degree, but from all the web sites using it, they sure did look similar.

What impressed me about vB was that although some sites using vB all looked alike, with a little work, you could really change how vB looked and more importantly, how it functioned. I've been working with vB now for the last six months and I'm still amazed sometimes at what I can do with it.

Of course, PHPNuke and vB are two totally different animals and I'm certianly not trying to compare one to the other, or say that one is better than the other. Each database solution has it's merits and each approaches things from a different angle.

It's just that although the vB's template system takes a little getting used to, I find that it gives me the flexibilty I need. Not that it's without it's flaws, but once you spend some time with it, I think you'll find it's worth it. :)

Well, in defense of all those PHP-Nuke sites out there... my site is nuke, and it sure doesn't look like a nuke site. Just html coding, but I can make it look like like just about any decent site design.
The site design is actually just a image folder, and one theme.php file. I guess php-nuke is as good as the person designing it.

I'm certainly not arguing on how good VB is, but what I am saying is the template system may be very flexible and powerful, but they also made it so complex in structure that all that flexibility and power is wasted on me, and from the sounds of it, a lot of other people, because we can't understand how it works.

I would personally rather trade a little bit of flexibility in exchange for ease of use, especially in my case when I have limited time, and a very large content site to run. trying to learn this system, and wasting my time hunting for things, mean less time for my site alas, and it's suffering a bit because of it.

yeah, all the nuke sites do look the same, but I also think it's perfect for people who are looking at a powerful system to run out of the box, yet don't have the experience in web design, or the time in my case, to go full bore. It does exactly what it's suppose to do, and you don't need a rocket science degree to use it either, which I guess is reflected in the average nuke design. :)

Well said. I agree with you 100%.

And having seen your site, I have to agree that your phpNuke site does stand out from all the rest I've seen. Really nice job.

I can't wait to see what you can do with vB. :p

actually, just the site design in there as well. it works, sort of at the moment.
To do a design, takes a bit of planning on my part, thank god for my decision to use nuke, as it means the dev time is cut in half there.
I develop Nuke free themes, so will be concentrating on that. After a design, it takes me a hour to code in, I doubt if I have the patience to do anything more with VB. *shrugs*

Once you get familiar with a few templates, I think you'll take to it. :)

Maybe, getting there at least. :)
Since I have so many questions on stuff, I made what I was working on the default. For some reason, my viewers find my design very "comfortable", so I haven't told them I'm gonna do a new one soon. :)

It works I guess, doesn't look to bad, but really just testing out some stuff. Only thing is it's a little slow, it doesn't cache the images properly, so I better read the manual, see if I can get it to cache the images, and not refresh them all the time. Would help if I compressed the buttons as well, haven't bothered yet.

Still not bad for 4 days work, and not knowing anything on the templates when I started. :D

Just bumping this.

Ive started work on this again. Ive doced over half the templates thus far and i sould have something done in a week or two.

The big question is, sould I allow people to download it and set it up themselves via a Zip file or sould i run it on my own server?. There are alot of images and .htm files to upload with this. I might code it in php once im done with the .htm verson, thoughts?.

Good luck with it AL.

I think it would be more convienient if it was run on your server, but there's a risk it could be down. So maybe the download option could be smart. *shrugs*