Is vb5 almost there now

From my limited experience, 5.1.2A is a massive improvement on 5.1.1, with the themes added, and with easy access to the stylevars, it's a lot easier to create a customised look.

There are problems still to be solved, like customising the category icons is still difficult, the previous fix for 5.1.1 seems to be broken in 5.1.2.A

 

Have you used that functionality yet Jack? If you do, let me know what you really think. I am honestly interested.

Scott

 

Which functionality would that be Scott?

 

Sorry, I meant the theme feature.

Scott

 

I'm still investigating it, however it does have some good points so far, for instance if you have all the themes available you only need to load the logo once, small, but good touch, having access to css.additional.css is handy too, rather than having to go into the admin.cp all the time. The only thing I have found is that any css you add has to be applied to each theme, thats a bit of a pain, but it may be a "bug".

 

Thanks Jack. Thanks Bob.

Scott

 

First thing I have noticed, and it can't be a bug, is that you can only edit css.additional.css for the default theme from site builder, however this is NOT copied to the other themes, you cannot alter the css.additional.css for them from site builder, you have to go into the acp, and do it there for each style.

Ok, it's only a copy/paste, and I'm not a coder, but is it that difficult to make the css.additional.css apply to all themes that are built in?

 

How many of you are there working on your football site Jack?
So far, it looks good

 

Just me unfortunately !

 

I'd see that as a fairly sensible limitation of the style system. After all, most people probably wouldn't want those kind of style changes to be implemented across all styles. If you really did want to do that it should be done by adding a child to a master theme. I appreciate that you probably can't do that with the new style system but in all honesty that seems to be a bit of a fudge to cater specifically for cloud users.

The bottom line is if you are not a cloud user you should probably use the vBulletin theme system to get the level of control you are looking for.

 

There is the ability to make child themes, Mark and Scott have been having a bit of a discussion about this at the other place, you cannot export a VB theme, but you can export it as a child theme, this may be the way for people to develop themes for publication.

 

OK, I probably should read up on it a little more as I can't quite fit that into my understanding of how it all hangs together. But yeah, using a child is the best way to pass down modifications to multiple styles.

 

Which is exactly my confusion. Because a theme should be only the standard default styles IB can ship within the software. Anything else, which is exported out of or imported into vB should be a style.

Scott

 

That is another point, if the MOD developer uses the new hook system, any MODs are applied to all themes when you refresh.

 

I don't really want to get in to that, I've always thought they were different words for the same thing in the forum world, in the real world of course they mean different things.

 

If it interests you.

Scott

 

I have actually read that thread previously, and I can now see having used VB5 what you were referring to, I have to agree that whilst it may all seem simple to whoever wrote the code for it, it is actually quite confusing for the user, until you start to click around and find out what buttons do what.

 

Yes, I knew when I saw the wire frames that basically, conceptually, things were getting totally mixed up. When that happens, the resulting programming can only be non-intuitive at best, or downright confusing at worst. I think they've hit the middle with their efforts and they won't be able to improve that, unless they formalize and separate the concept of themes from the concept of styles completely. As long as the two are so mixed up like they are, it will stay a usability mess.

Scott

 

5.1.3 still looks like it might be the time to consider the upgrade

Another 180 bug fixes listed in the progress
http://tracker.vbulletin.com/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10091&version=11020

Plus AdminCP option to redirect 404 pages to the root node
Handy if your killing a lot of pages / removing seo software

Looks like the tidying up of white space has disappeared from the planned update