Uploadable User Profile Themes

[NeroObsedian]

Hey all, I'm about to overall my forums in the next week or two and as I draw up my action plan I've run into some questions. I'm sketchy at best when it comes to php from scratch but I can hold my own when it comes to manipulating etc. so there are a great of things that I'm simply not aware of when it comes to MySQL and php.

I've broken my plan into two phases.

Phase I
1. Profile/UserCP over hall - I'd like to make this more like a page than anything else. I suppose you could compare it to myspace, I would just like some better organization and better presentation. I have it on paper atm and may cook up a preview in PS tonight.

Now, my question in regards to this doesn't have to do with templates or anything, its the amount of extra options I have included. As it is a gaming forum there is a games played selection with radio buttons, WoW character mod, which is currently Snooy's gWoWChar mod, gXbox Live, Halo3 mod, and a few other options of my own.

What I want to ask is I believe I saw someone say the more conditionals you have on a page the more strain there is on the DB. In the end there may be roughly 50+ per UserCP. Is that too many? I have about 190 Active members, typically 5 people on the forums at any given time.

2. Memberlist over hall - I'm intending to make this a single row with no columns per user. I was intending to on including their Forum Avatar, their main WoW character (Class, Race), their main SWG character (Profession/Race) and the same for WAR. All of this information will be in different tabs within their UserCP/Profile.

I really doubt I'll hit the 50 mark on this as I'm sure a full page of members running conditionals with definitely be bad, though I'm really not sure, hence the questions. However with a guild that's spread out across four MMOs and a small selection of other games its difficult to keep track of character names. I myself have... *thinks* 10 SWG, 5 WoW, 2 WAR, 1 EVE character, XBL tag, Steam, xFire and station aliases. Though all of those names are not needed it would greatly decrease frustration involved with migrating game to game and joining the player association.

Phase II
Completely BEYOND my skill level at the moment... I'm currently looking into ways to have an option for users to upload their own profile theme. The template would be active only between the Navigation, or from the bottom of the table w/ PM updates/login to the footer of the page. I was going to include a page on the UserCP with a list of templates to be used for the different options they wanted on their profile. However, I don't know how to make it so that if someone with vBB experience writes a template that includes something I don't want on the profile, I guess a file check for invalid characters would do the trick? Is there already anything like this? Not recommended? Etc.

On a side note, think about how much potential there is with Custom Profile/Blog themes for vBB. If someone isn't familar enough with vBB to write a theme or just a member somewhere perhaps they'd be likely to drop a few $ on something like that. Even for free themes that could generate a lot of traffic for sites with theme downloads.

I'd appreciate any thoughts, recommendations or comments on this?