It seems IPB has the biggest flaw here. It is so much harder to skin for than vBulletin. What do you think they can do to get better in this area?
It was compared to vB3, but vB4 seems to be taking over as more complicated to skin. I think they have way to much php and trash in their templates and need to find a way to move it all out and provide phrases like vBulletin does. IPB Skinning was really the only area of complaint for me when I had an IP.Board license. But I guess after a while I would have got used to it
I'm not a designer, so obviously have nothing to do with skinning, but from what I remember of when I used IPB 2.x, the templates always baffled me. It was so different that vBulletin's templates (which were so easy in 3.x) and I just never dealt with them. :shrug:
Have you taken a look at this guide - IPB 3 - How to - skinning... - Computer Help Forum Things aren't quite as bad as I originally thought.
Indeed a nice link. I think that link needs to be stickied in the ipb area here with other informative links that could be added along side this in the future.
Yeah, the last time I spoke to a developer I was told they might come up with a similar guide or just use that and credit the author. Works a treat actually.
I have a couple of ideas to enable you to make sweeping 'simple' changes for future versions. Right now our skin uses CSS quite heavily. This is good because you can make major changes to the layout without tweaking the HTML but the downside is a steep learning curve to locate all the item locations.
IPB isn't that hard to style at all, I checked how themes were done and it has some stuff I do liked very well (like some variables parsed on the CSS), and the templates mainly differ because they are not exported on an XML but a HTML doc separated by comments, but is not a headache. For the vB 4 side, I think it is extremly hard to work with it, since you had to go to each class (from the billion list) and try to make what you want on the crappy box with some attributes. I'm wondering why don't they have some sort of advanced editing tab (like MyBB) to manually edit the CSS.
Yeah, the skinning is quite hard. That guide is nice and I think I may try to skin one myself. Does IPB allow a privately accessible (only me and staff members) testing installation on the same domain (well, test.domain.tld)? I don't want to start testing on my live forum. I just transferred over from MyBB and MyBB's skinning system is SO EASY.
I don't know of any used licenses floating around just now. I imagine events and circumstances with that other forum software has led to IPB licenses getting snapped up pretty quickly. You might check at Digital Point, though.
