Is there a place I can go for quick skin support?

[Jaxel]

Yes, I could easily post a thread here asking questions... but I have a new question every hour, and by long, it will be hundreds of threads. Not to mention, the whole idea of having a simple question as "How do I increase the padding in the forumhead block?"; and then having it take twelve hours to get a response is just insulting to me. VB has failed to give us any sort of credible documentation on the variables in the StyleVar customizer; as well as a complete lack of certain variables which should be there. Hell, most of the variables in the system I change just to see what happens... and they do nothing. There is even that PDF showing how to customize your skin in 10 easy steps, and that guide is completely wrong! The whole "blocks" section of the StyleVars dont do anything.

So is there a better place to go besides here or vb.com? Is there a chatroom of some sort?

[borbole]

Originally Posted by Jaxel

Yes, I could easily post a thread here asking questions... but I have a new question every hour, and by long, it will be hundreds of threads. Not to mention, the whole idea of having a simple question as "How do I increase the padding in the forumhead block?"; and then having it take twelve hours to get a response is just insulting to me. VB has failed to give us any sort of credible documentation on the variables in the StyleVar customizer; as well as a complete lack of certain variables which should be there. Hell, most of the variables in the system I change just to see what happens... and they do nothing. There is even that PDF showing how to customize your skin in 10 easy steps, and that guide is completely wrong! The whole "blocks" section of the StyleVars dont do anything.

So is there a better place to go besides here or vb.com? Is there a chatroom of some sort?

That documentation is very detailed btw. At least the way I have seen it, it is well documented.

Also I don''t see why it should make you feel insulted the fact that you must wait 12 hours to get a response. That is pretty normal. You are not the only person asking for support you know. Also have you tried to do a search before asking instead of waiting around? As the chances are that most of the things have been covered numerous times before.

Anyway, to answer your second question, personally I don''t know of any other forum or chatroom that offers support for vb. But maybe there are. Hopefully someone else might know some.

[Jaxel]

Originally Posted by borbole

That documentation is very detailed btw. At least the way I have seen it, it is well documented.

No... its not. For instance... lets look at the variable "navbarsearch_padding". What does it do? By default the variable is 2; if I change it to 20, I don't see a difference. Therefore it does nothing. There is no documentation anywhere that tells you what it does.

If you look, there is a big 10px space between the image and the navbar, as well I want to add some padding to the left of the image. So I went into the stylevar customizer and found the section for header padding... which by default has the 10px padding at the bottom of the navbar. So I edited this to 0, and added a 10 px padding to the left side. It fixed the padding on the image, but the problem is that it also changed the padding of the ENTIRE header area... As seen in the image below.



Is there an easy fix for this without template modification? Who knows, there is no documentation on it.

Originally Posted by Jaxel

I've having trouble doing some customization on the navbar...

"navbar_tab_background" controls the background of the navbar, and "navbar_tab_selected_background" controls the background of the currently selected button, as well as the hover effect of unselected buttons.

Why is there not a variable for "navbar_tab_unselected_background"? How would I edit that?

Things that should exist don't. Things that do exist, aren't needed as they don't do anything (such as the ENTIRE Blocks section).

You say its well documented... where? You mean on the RARE case that a StyleVar has a description that is not only meaningful, but factual?

The features available in VB4 are amazing, but the style manager itself is a reason for me wanting my money back. If I can't even get the styles I had with VB3 to work similar with VB4 without significant template modifications, then I can't use VB4.

[Lynne]

You may be interested in this article to help you find stylevars yourself - HOW TO Find what Stylevar you need to edit

[Jaxel]

Talking about the lack of documentation... here is a simple one...

How do I make the preview text for the CMS contain more text?

Yes, these questions have been asked before, but in rare cases do they ever get legitimate answers.

[Lynne]

Originally Posted by Jaxel

Talking about the lack of documentation... here is a simple one...

How do I make the preview text for the CMS contain more text?

You use a preview break.

[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?

[vijayninel]

^^ Yes all of that is quitle well know by now and even acknowledged by some of the people in vb.com. There is an recognition that the styling system of vB4 is messed up right now and needs to be fixed.

What I am hearing is that the the problems in the stylevar system and other styling problems will be addressed starting from vb 4.04 (although I doubt it). Until then use the default styles because all the existing styles are likely to break during these upgrades.

My sincere advise is don't try to customize vB4 skins now. Its not worth the effort. Do it after a few months if/when the vB4 styling system is a little more stable.

[Jaxel]

I expected more from VB4... and looking back, I don't know why. Remembering poorly how social groups and picture albums were implemented, I really should have expected VB4 to have these issues. VB4 is clearly designed by programmers, when it should be designed by users. The programming behind VB4 is actually really good, but the design of many of the functions are completely asinine.

But for now... lets see if I can get a quick question answered...

For making my own mods, in VB3, I would use tcat/thead/alt1/alt2 for my classes. Now that these are gone, what classes should I be using?