[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by Ziki

Yes,but they could have included an option to get rid of all that Social networking stuff,like use old style profiles.

Why do people keep saying that? It's under vBulletin Options in the Admin CP. The only thing that can't be changed is the orientation of the blocks and the use of tabs. But the entire Social Networking aspect of profiles can be ticked on and off with specificity.

Originally Posted by KTBleeding

Well, perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been. My issue is not with the template system itself, but the markup used in the templates. Tables, tables, tables.. and when there are literally hundreds of different templates inside of a style, it is way too overwhelming for someone like me to go in and make it different. Like I said, I have tried and lost motivation.

I don't think that it's HARD to do.. just frustrating. It's almost 2009, and tableless markup has been around for years now. Imagine a vBulletin where a new style meant almost never having to touch the html markup.. and only doing it all with css? Why that wasn't a main focus for vB 3.5 (hell, even 3.0) I will never understand, and I think it is absolutely ridiculous that it is now 3.8 and it still isn't even on the list.

I am just stating, that is the main reason why I have turned from vBulletin.. and I'm sure there's at least a handful of people who feel the same I do? This may or may not be their plans for 4.0, I don't know.. but at that point, I think it's going to be too little too late.

PHPBB is free, and their default style is light years ahead of vBulletins (note that I'm talking strictly about markup here, not the look/feel of the style itself). There's something wrong with that picture, if you ask me.

Let's be pragmatic here. Other then the ideological stance people have with tables, moving over to DIVs isn't going to change a whole lot for designers. You actually will still have to touch the templates most of the time you would have for a table based one.

But as far as the slow move to pure CSS (which I've always felt was a poor choice of words, but I digress again), you have to consider the fact that vBulletin has always made their changes gradually. Which, having done some designing myself, is a welcome behaviour, because there would nothing worse, even from a coder's standpoint, for them to make such dramatic shifts in the code and styling of the product that you have to re-learn everything all over again. This may not be their primary motivation, but I'm sure they've considered what kind of a shock to the styles and mods market a less then gradual change would have on their system. It may be slow to others, but over all it makes sense to keep it paced for the masses.