[Wayne Luke]

Originally Posted by CyberAlien

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.

There is actually a feature in debug mode that does this for you and has been available since vBulletin 2.X.
http://vbcodex.com/showthread.php?t=28

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.

A new three-way diff/merge system will be introduced in vBulletin 4 that should make most template modifications automatically when upgrading to newer versions of the vBulletin 4 series. Though users will need to edit templates less for basic style changes.

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.

The rewrite of the Style and Templating System is one of the core focuses of vBulletin 4. In future versions, we'll look at reducing the number of overall templates since new structures will reduce the need for them. See:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=217569
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=217570