Hi
Requests Learn Make Skin.
thank you

If you want to make a skin, not just change colors, then you need to use a image editor, like Corel or Photoshop! First you design the layout then create a sliced template that you write your html to fill in. After you take out the bloated vBulletin template(s) and replace it with your own, adding whatever style changes you want.

Most times I strip the vBulletin style completely and create a static CSS file for the template, the reason why I do this is because I can cut out half of all the junk vBulletin uses in many templates that are not needed to render the same HTML in most all modern browsers!

If you want some basic starter templates, tell me and I will give you a few that you can try to learn from.

Do you have an example of this 'bloated' code?

With these images, for example, in CSS editor process, you can have an idea..

• Forum Home Template
• Navbar Template
• New Thread Template
• Thread Template
• User Control Panel Template
• What's Going On Template

;)

OK I'll give... how does vB having a reference for people 'bloat' their code for the actual product in any way?

Thank you.

I guess I will spend some time explaining myself seeing you seem to be offended by my opinion!

First, to understand what I mean you must understand that PHP is a low level scripting language. It does not have the same rules that other programming languages have. For example in C you are responsible for memory management. So a good rule is to never create variable assignments that might never be used, because if you do your wasting memory that another instance of your application could be using. In PHP you don't have that responsibility, so without knowing how to manage memory properly, you create applications that become a resource nightmare. vBulletin fits into that category because it does many things that are not always needed, so the global scope gets filled with wasteful variable assignments that never get used, which uses more memory than what it should!

Application logic is a critical part to any development, what the application outputs is not how good application is judged, if you think that then you don't understand, standard logical programming. Now in PHP(s) case, it invites this problem, because PHP(s) learning curve is very easy, you end up with thousands of hacked up programs floating around the internet. Take look a HotScripts, it waste land of dangerous scripts. It's not PHP(s) fault, it's the persons fault for not learning how to follow some basic rules, because they are more concern with getting what they want done, then to write logical code that does what they want in more resource friendly, safer way.

As for the other vB bloating, CSS as come long way, it has made developing HTML to be more cross browser compatible. But what is the point to design a style system that doesn't take full advantage of the current CSS standards. If you have good definition style system, then you don't need to throw style attributes all over your templates, or use deprecated tags where CSS could be used to bring the size of the output to almost half the size in some of the templates. If you compare forum software, vBulletin will always output (30%) or more in HTML than other forums that have the same basic forum display, and that is because the templates are not taking advantage of vBulletins own style system.


me!

How could anyone be offended? You haven't proved your point yet. Three paragraphs not related to skinning, and still not one valid example of 'bloated' vb code. Oh well... ;)

Would be nice if a good tutorial was written to create your own skin.
Hopefully this will be added.

creating skins is not hard anyone can do it in 5 minutes i can show you a REALLY crummy one i made in 7 minutes 23 seconds (call me sad but i don't care): http://forums.perfectforce.com/index.php?styleid=12

It's only about 25% done but it has the mean look and feel which is: tborder, alt1 and 2, tcat and thead.

Warning: Don't look at the skin to long otherwise you'll faint :p