[Ted S]

Thanks for the comments Action-N... lengthy reply below (sorry).

Originally Posted by Action-N

I guess you can say the mod authors are reinventing the wheel with their layouts.

Pretty much although it's rarely for the sake of doing so versus just being efficient. It's simply easier to build new than try and figure out what vB element would apply, much less explain to people how to customize it without changing the entire forum when the questions come in.

We make mods to bring functionality to sites and try to apply some best practices to go along with it [like being able to edit our mod's style without breaking your entire forum as we've seen others do]. While we keep to vB's squares and tables the layout their anything but modern nor is there a container to handle product type elements so you're dead on, we broke the box.

Certainly we could have made it all stock elements but we made a conscious decision on where to spend our time. If that results in a deal breaker that's great feedback but not likely to change.

I ended up deleting that stuff from my template, but you should consider fixing that or option to disable them.

Thanks, we'll take a look for sure. Obviously fixing quirks and making logical decisions to the design is high on goal list but really we want to encourage sites to customize beyond the box especially where it's not possible for us to make a change without a code hack (like the column header for a forum).

It doesn't sound like this applies to you but most forums get sucked in to sticking to how things run by default and then wonder why their conversion rate, retention, revenue, or other KPIs are so bad. The web has too many options, too many great sites to be cookie-cutter.

The having to manually add the thumbnail pictures sucks

We added an image uploader and bulk importer almost a year ago. Both autocreate thumbnails as long as have [to your first point] the template calls to get them.

and learning to add products

Not sure what the problem is here but all for feedback?