[Jaxel]

So you're saying, in order to understand anything going on with VB4, I need to install both FireFox, and a FireFox Entension? Seriously? There is no documentation, and you are asking your users to create the documentation for you?! This is no way to provide "documentation". Then of course, there are other issues, with StyleVars simply NOT EXISTING. For instance "forumhead_padding" does not exist!! Yes, I know I could go into the CSS and change it myself; but if I have to do that, then whats the purpose of the StyleVar Manager? The padding is programmed in somewhere, as there is already a default padding. How come we can't edit it?

The advertisements for vb4 promise uniformity between all the sections of the site; however when you start getting into the StyleVar editor, you realize this is wrong. All sections of the site have their own settings, and if you want to edit the blockheads, you need to edit the blockheads multiple times in each section. The simple "tcat", "thead", "alt1" and "alt2" of vb3 were a lot easier to manage. Vb4 is less uniform than vb3. Fonts aren't uniform either; you end up having to edit hundreds of font tags. Then of course you have issues where places ARE uniform, when they shouldn't be. For instance color of links are uniform, when they shouldn't be. If the default link color on my site is white, but then I have a blockhead which has a background color of white, I need to change the font colors in this blockhead. For instance, where is "forumhead_link_color"? Right now there is an easy way to change the color of normal text, but not the link text. Why not? This was available across the board in vb3.

The code in vb4 is so obfuscated that its pretty much impossible to understand whats going on without significant research and training... information that vbulletin solutions has yet to provide us with. VB4 promised us more editing options; when I feel like it has actually given us less. The StyleVar Manager is so completely useless that you may as well just stop using and it edit your skins directly through the Template Manager. I've seen so many VB4 websites and NONE of them have "unique" skins, they have the default VB skin, just with different colors. Firebug doesn't answer the majority of the issues I am having with VB4, such as the header padding issue I posted in one of my previous posts. VB4 reeks of a whole "my way or the highway" programming style; not giving us the option for simple changes.

And WTF is a preview break? Where is this documented? There is a preview break button in the posting module, but you think the average user clicks the majority of those buttons? How are they supposed to figure it out? Trial and error? There should be a setting for a DEFAULT preview cutoff... It has to be programmed in somewhere... how come we can't edit it? What if I don't want my home page to use previews at all? What if I want the entire article to appear on the CMS? I have to put a preview break at the end of ALL my articles? But the "Read More" link still appears! And how do users see how many comments there are to an article from the CMS? They can't without looking at the article directly. And what is a page break? I've inserted it into my articles, and it doesn't appear to do anything. If I can't figure it out, how are my users expected to?