Does anyone else find Theme development annoying as hell?

Seriously, I'm finding it an absolute pain in the proverbial these days, namely for the following reasons:

1. Modification coders seem to be complete crap at writing HTML and CSS. Seriously, the amount of time I must have wasted over the years trying to fix other people's HTML and CSS after installing their useful add ons/plugins could probably be counted in weeks now. Not to mention how many of them seem to completely ignore the script's API (like the 'register styles' thing in WordPress) and hence make you have to go into the actual PHP files to get their stupid script to stop outputting CSS links in the header.

Oh, and those damn alt attributes. Seriously, it seems half the mod makers of the internet seem to completely forget to put them in, so you have to go hunting through PHP files and templates to fix their complete lack of knowledge about modern HTML.

2. Every single freaking forum script seems like it's been made as complicated as possible on the HTML and CSS end, to the point where deviating significantly from the norm takes weeks of work. Especially the likes of Invision Power Board, which seems to be designed to be as ridiculous annoying to style as possible to the literally hundreds of lines of CSS, more hundreds/thousands of lines of HTML per page and the absolute sheer ridiculous amount of validation errors some of the outdated versions have. I can take a WordPress theme from a mock up to a design in a few hours. It's gonna take me about a week to implement my new forum styles on IPB.

3. Oh, and CSS sprites can go to hell. Seriously, what a stupid, annoying concept for images. It not only makes it incredibly hard for your average Joe to just replace the icons like he would on any normal site, but it also acts like a nice 'screw you' to anyone who can't use an image editing program with transparency. Why this stupid idea wasn't left to die in the 16 bit era of video games I don't know, it was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now.

So yeah, anyone else feel like this, and find theme development extremely annoying because of these things?

 

vB5 uses those #$^%&*^ sprites too ... and no editor, of course.

 

If it's a new script I'm using then yes I can get very annoyed, especially when it takes ages to find what part of the code changes a certain aspect of the site that I want to edit lol.
But to be fair, once I get used to it and know where everything is that I need to edit it's a doddle after that.

 

To me is not big deal tackling a theme development as traditionally done, but I have been facing hard times trying to implement bootstrap into different themes and layouts.

I have spent long, long hours playing with bootstrap integration and when I think I have everything done, something fails, usually sort of conflict with jQuery that I have not been able to resolve yet despite I have about a whole year struggling with such integration.

 

Honestly, my advice is simple; don't try and use a whole new framework when developing for a script like IPB or vBulletin or XenForo. The amount of effort needed and the amount of problems that come up due to the awkward way themes are coded makes it not really worth it.

 

Yeah, I'm seeing now. My latest attempt was trying to integrate some of these pre-made generic templates just for testing purposes, http://startbootstrap.com/all-templates

However and again had to put on hold the project due to the many problems with bootstrap, so that I will better follow your advice

 

Man I agree with you on most what you say but I'm all in with CSS sprites. If you care about the loading time your site takes then use CSS sprites. If you can't care less then go for individual images.

 

Convenience and editing wise, sprites are just far worse than seperate images. How is your average joe supposed to just overwrite images they want to change with minimal CSS and image editing knowledge? Oh wait...

Indeed, forget loading time, you shouldn't have images that take that long to load to begin with. Additionally, keep in mind that the only reason game devs used sprites in the olden days were because they didn't have much space for resources in the game ROM, Or something, but it was because of resources and the consoles only being able to show a certain amount on screen and what not. There's a reason that they're not used any more for the most part.

Then again, I suspect a lot of things seem to be overcomplicated now because certain people want them to be, probably to get rid of the competition and force people to rely on their 'services'.