Forum WTF is going on with the navbar templates. Frontend Devs please read.
 

I dived into the navbar templates today to do some serious skinning and noticed some extremely concerning things:

1) The parent of the subnav (the list below Home/Forum/Blogs) changes for each part of the site? (CMS, Forum, Blog) What is the logic behind this? It makes it impossible to position the sub navigation without editing it in 3 places (to take it out of a parent) or you have to absolutely position it - which is inconvenient at best to some designs.

EG in the forum:
HTML Code:

• Home
  
• Forum
  
  • ..sub nav is here
  
  
  

And in the CMS:
HTML Code:

• Home
  
  • Now the nav has completely changed is position in the markup!
  
  
  
• Forum
  

I ask, WHY? It's being displayed in the same position everytime, the tree-like strucutre is pointless unless you're displaying all the sub-navs at once.

2) In the Navbar template, the ENTIRE TEMPLATE is repeated, from what I see just to assign the class of "selected" to the "forum" tab when the user is in the User CP
This is what we have:
Code:

Menu code...
Then straight below:
Code:

IDENTICAL code...
This one is a head scratcher....just why? If anything, remove the '$vboptions['selectednavtab']' for usercp.php and avoid having to repeat code and bloat the template.

3) Various unnecessary styles, If you have a list with links inside it, you don't need to assign "class="navtab" to EVERY single tag in the list, as you can reference them in CSS simply with #menu li a {} very inefficient and happens in a lot more than just the navbar template.

3.1) Unnecessary/Descriptive classnames, if doing CSS right, an entire site could easily be changed with just a stylesheet (I point you to http://www.csszengarden.com/ for a sterling example). Therefore class names of "floatcontainer" and "smallfont" should never exist. They should be completely switchable, and who says that in my design I want said element to be floated? I now cant change the css values of floatcontainer as it will f*ck up everything else you have arbitrarily applied this class to. So I have to dive into the markup, which I don't really want to do as you mess with the templates every time you release an update.

I'm now gonna spend the rest of the day, and probably tomorrow clearing this template up, and that's just one template. I could easily fit into half the markup and probably a lot less CSS. The sad thing is that I will more than likely have to repeat my actions when they release a new version in like a month.

The frontend of the vb dev team have really made a mess of things, and its not surprising that the script is bloated with instances of mass-repeat going on like in this example. A lot of the IE6 bugs that needed fixing wouldn't have existed had it been made properly and flexible in the first place. Regarding front-end development, this really is just vb3.8 and a half.