Visual Skinning Guide in ACP

[joe_m]

IPB's skinning is staggeringly difficult to master and requires far too much time to grasp (let alone master), especially compared to your competition.

Please for the love of God come up with a visual skinning solution! Ideally I could hover on an element and change font and background.

I spent at least 10 hours over the holiday *trying* to skin our (idle) forums to replicate the color scheme of our Threads forums (which I skinned in under an hour); and likely face another 10 to 20 hours. This is ridiculous, and if I can't wrap this up soon I'm buying a vB license.

For those who'll accuse me of being a moron, I have been administering and skinning forums for over 6 years, write html and php, etc etc. So I am a moron with qualifications to do this, it's just IPB is unnecessarily complex and too smart for its own good at times.

[ZeroSum]

I agree; it is a bit complicated and quite often the changes that should fix the problem don't work.

[mortenz]

I agree that skinning could be more user friendly. The fundamental problem is that that you have to edit 200 mini-templates and 200 CSS-definitions (haven't counted). It is an overwhelming task to go through everything to make edits that cover the entire look of the board. I'm sure that if you are a pro skinner you can do everything, but for the average administrator it is a showstopper.

The ideal would be the possibility to edit major templates representing the different page-types (board, forum, posting etc.). I know that that is in a way what we are doing already, but there is simply to many bits.

Paralysis by analysis. ;)

[bfarber]

Much of this will be addressed in 3.0. You will have those who want absolute control on the one hand, and those who want everything simplified on the other hand. 3.0 will have a lot of changes in store in terms of the skinning engine, and specifically how the templates are structured. Stay tuned.

[ZeroSum]

Much of this will be addressed in 3.0. You will have those who want absolute control on the one hand, and those who want everything simplified on the other hand. 3.0 will have a lot of changes in store in terms of the skinning engine, and specifically how the templates are structured. Stay tuned.

There seem to be some IE related issues with the 'float: right;' style and with the pagelink buttons. You wouldn't believe how many errors and warnings were generated checking the default stylesheet at W3C. :)