Thread layout like to the 'Mods' and 'Styles' sections of vbulleting.org?

[monkeyfight]

Hi. With my limited knowledge so far of vBulletin, it looks to me that vbulletin.org uses a very modified version of the original vBulletin install.

I'm mainly wondering how I can achieve the same sort of layout for something I'm working on as you can see in any of the Mods or Style threads. As a randomly picked example look at this.

That page is been rendered with the showthread.php, same as any of the threads in the Forums or Articles section etc, but it's layout is significantly different and I'm wondering how I might go about achieving it with various Mods and Plugins etc, or whether it involves a lot of template hacking?

The look I'm going for is like that, where the first post in the thread is separated at the top from the replies which are then categorised as comments, rather than the regular board layout. The first thread by the original poster also includes a lot of custom info in a little table at the top like Version, Rating, Released etc, which is something I'd like to try implement as it is there, for the first poster only. And then there's the little info table on the right of the first post with Mod Information and The Developer, which is also nice.

So, any ideas folks? Any help would be really really appreciated! I'm guessing there's a lot of dev work gone into getting those sections looking like that but if anyone can think of any fairly simple ways of achieving something similar that'd be great.

Thanks a lot!
Rich

[Lynne]

There is a hack called Chief First Post and it gives a different postbit to the first post in a thread (like here). That one allows the user to pick it, but you can easily modify it to not allow the user to pick it and just have you, the admin, define it. The hack comes with a couple of added postbit templates. You can play with one of those and see if you can get the look you want. You can also look at the source code of a page that you like and use the same CSS that is used and the same html and achieve an exact look if you wanted.

[monkeyfight]

That sounds like it might just do the trick! Thanks a lot for the advice Lynne, Rich.