I was *so* hoping that they changed the style system in vB4. They didn't. Ugh.

[azn_romeo_4u]

It's been 2 years (?) since phpbb launch their css based style system. Go to their template section and what do you see? All the templates look the same. Sure forcing people to style with css is nice, but it's alteast 10x harder. You could probably be looking at 1000+ lines worth of CSS code and all the major web browsers to make sure they alteast look alright.

It'll be a whole year or two before we even see "unique" looking templates like you did with vb3.

I agree man...should have done better with the template system.

[Adrian Schneider]

The idea is to avoid modifying templates at all... hence the CSS.

I'd rather write a 1000 line stylesheet than have to edit 50 templates and deal with them every time I upgrade. If you are good at web design, CSS shouldn't be a problem. If they make it easier for designers to make styles (which it will), then it will help increase the number of quality styles being released.

You're going to get crappy styles no matter what the forum system is. I'm much more interested in having the tools to actually create the better ones without having to hack at the templates and code too much. It's going to take a while... all of the documentation isn't even done yet, nor is vB4 even stable yet.

Also, remember that we are still in a transitional state. The templates will start to be combined as development time allows, because we can get rid of most of the 'bit' templates by using loops in templates now.