Forum Problems where ever I look in converting our board
 

We are currently running a test-installation of vB 4 and the production board is still on vB 3. I guess it will remain there for a longer period of time. And that's because I keep running into problems:

• We have 90 skins in the production board. That's because we host a lot of forums for editors, which all want to have a different skin, different colors. With vB 3 setting up a new skin was rather easy. One page with all the CSS-variables, some changements to the colors and there we were. A matter of say 15 minutes at most. 2,5 hours, that's the time it took me to convert our basic design to vB 4 and yet it isn't finished. There are still some things which don't match, still some blue from the basic vB 4 design. Here are the basic problems I had:
  • Where is the StyleVar Editor? This was the first question and I was lost...
  • At the first moment I didn't find out how to show more than one Stylevar on one page. It isn't self-explanatory, that you need to choose the stylevars on the left by clicking Shift. I found out after half an hour.
  • It took me hours to find some of the stylevars. On vB 3 you simply looked into the code of the page, took the name of the class and searched for it. That isn't possible any longer, as the naming in the StyleVar-Editor is other than the one in the code. The Search feature doesn't help...
  • What really got me in trouble: Our old styles all use specifically designed buttons for reply and newthread. I cannot use them any longer. They are obsolote as so many other things. But why? Wouldn't it be nicer to let the designer decide whether he wants to get rid of graphical buttons and use CSS-styled buttons? We are running a comicbook-forum. The css-buttons are just ugly and don't fit our needs!
  • It will take me at least several weeks to transfer the colors to the new system. When changing from vB 2 to vB 3 it took me some days.
• The position of the ads are kind of a problem. We had the ads on the right side of the logo. That's not possible any longer. The position of the login / welcome-box prevents it (728*90) from being there. We had a second position for ads beneath the navbar, which needs to be used now. I guess our users won't like it, that the new position will be now there. As far as I am concerned, the box for the welcome should be on the same hight as the breadcrumb.

Well, these things might seem small to anyone else. But they are show-stoppers at the moment. I think we will be waiting for vBulletin 4.1 and hope that some of these problems are addressed there.

I can understand, that recoding had to be done. I can understand some of the design-changes. But vBulletin should have been coded at least so flexible, that some things don't seem like a decision from the chair of the boss. It's a bit like the legacy-postbit. Some things, like the graphics for reply and newthread shouldn't be skipped without enabling the admins to make the decision.