Template doc's

[Brad]

im not sure if this as been done before but i think its a good idea so i started on it.

what im looking to do is explain what every (stock) template in vbulletin dose, hopefully included a screen shot of each. i think this would make it easy on newbie admins. i also hope to lay it out like the admin cp template editor.


so sould i finish it?

[SaintDog]

Sure - Although there are a great deal of templates you would have to document .

[Brad]

ive done it for ubb before .

[imported_Niloc]

i say go for it I would be interested in it!

[Dean N Steve]

and me... its gon take u a long time tho...

btw ive always wondered what post[firstnewinsert] does in the postbit - not sure if its spelt right

[Brad]

looks like this project is ganna be put off awhile, we are currently int he middle of scripting our vbulletin to use a oracle DB backend. ill bring this thread back up when i have time for this again.

Shame, as I'm struggling with my first attempt.

I hate to say this, but the template system for VB has to be the worse I have ever seen. It's almost impossible to make sense of it, because of the shear amount of files. I still haven't been able to figure out quite a bit of it, and am just running around in circles wasting a lot of time experimenting, trying to get a simple design to work properly the way I want it to look.

Needless to say, a guide that explains what each template does would help, as after attempting my own code, I now can understand why there's a lot more styles for other forums out there than VB. Jeez, why couldn't they have made this simplier?

Hopefully, you can resume work, and do up a guide, especially for the graphic end. I'm having a lot of problems trying to find where to put the code to add a image to the bottom of the home and category listing pages, though the postbit is fine, as it's all on one template.

[SaintDog]

vBulletin has one of the more complete, more useable template systems over other boards. There is not much that you cannot edit with the current template system (although it is supposed to change with the release of vB 3); it will only get better .

Originally posted by SaintDog
vBulletin has one of the more complete, more useable template systems over other boards. There is not much that you cannot edit with the current template system (although it is supposed to change with the release of vB 3); it will only get better .

Yeah, after counting the amount of template files, I can believe you there.

Actually, this is a case of a coder gone mad I think. Just looking at a lot of these, where there's a few templates with just one or two lines of code in them. Other templates are just part of a page, and I wish they had named the templates a little better. I guess master PHP coders may understand them, but certainly not me. You had a example of changing the breadcrumb nav from the text ">" to a image, but I just went through the templates, and to match that you have to change at least 10 other templates so you have a consistant look on all your pages.

I do PHP-Nuke themes, it's a very basic, simple system, you can change the codes for the header, footer, blocks, main table content block, news headlines and news articles, If you know what you are doing, you can have separate right blocks, and additional code. Once I finish a design, it takes me about half a hour to code it all in complete, before i debug. It's all on one page, or you can insert html files and have everything set up as separate pages.

I use it more for a template wrap than anything, but despite it's simplicity, it's still a very easy system to use, yet has some very powerful template capabilities. Just about anyone with basic HTML/PHP experience can use it, without needed a tutorial to explain everything.

VB on the other hand....

Just a opinion, but software can only be as good as the people that use it, but it doesn't help when only a small handful of those people have the skill and knowledge in all areas to use it properly. I always believed that truly great software should be easy to learn and to use by everyone.

I hope with V3 that they make the ability to change the templates a lot better, and a lot simplier, but I think they will only make it more confusing than it is now.

A suggestion is a new section that details the templates, and where to add code to them for the various graphics. I've notice quite a few posts asking the same questions, so maybe just having one section in this forum would be the best, and I can finish my theme design as well.

[mashby]

Shiva,

I'm sure that this has grown as the vB system itself has grown. I know it's confusing and somewhat overwhelming, but I like the fact that there are so many temlates because that allows more flexiblity.

I do know that they are re-vamping most of vB for 3.0, so perhaps they will have a simplier system. I just hope we don't loose any flexibility along the way.