[CyberAlien]

Originally Posted by Paul M

He was a Drupal fan, simple as that.

That doesn't mean his arguments aren't valid.

I completely agree with all his points on template system. Its bloated, updating is a nightmare, editing is a nightmare, reordering elements isn't possible, which leads to all styles using the same boring default templates set.

When I was working with vBulletin templates I had to write my own mod which exported templates to editable files (php for css templates, html for other templates), so I won't have to use horrible tiny textarea and could use BBEdit instead. I feel sorry for majority of designers who are using control panel textarea, its not a tool for editing templates.

Every update, which are out very often, changes something in templates. Often its just a few tabs/spaces, but its still marked as a new version, which means I have to revert my custom template and then have to do changes again. As coder I can handle that, but what about users? For users its too complex, so even if user was using a cool style that wasn't yet another simple header/footer change of the default style, it means he has to stick to default style so reverting templates won't cause any compatibility problems.

I do hope template system will be rebuilt in v4 and all html will be separated from php, which would allow designers to create styles that use different order of elements, which might lead to designers releasing some cool looking layouts.