I wasn't looking for an exact replica, but was trying to capture the general look and feel, and I reckon it does that fairly well. Except, obviously, it's red.
Very nice looking, although maybe editing the blocks around the sides would make it look even better? You know, a bit more like the actual vB CMS?
Funnily enough, I had been thinking about that. Part of the problem is, those blocks obviously match the 3.8 design (apart from the rounded corners if you have Firefox or a webkit browser), and if I change those, it raises the question that the "front page" of the site is no longer consistent in design with the rest. So what you're really faced with then is redesigning the entire site. This, I think, is where vBulletin have gone wrong with the styling, it's just not consistent any more. A block or box in one place on the site should be much the same style as one somewhere else - or if thre are to be different ones, they need a structure as to why they're they're different, and again the differences should be consistent. This theory drove me up the wall after a while so for now I've elected to leave the side blocks as they are, to match the general 3.8 design. But I may revisit this at some point.
I meant what the content was in the blocks, not the styling. Your current style looks better than the vBulletin 4 one as is. So you'd have recent blog and forum posts to the right, and... other stuff to the left. I never really cared about consistency personally either, my own site has a completely different style for the site and forum, and I don't think anyone really minds.
Ah I see....yes, you have a good point there. It's laid out how it is to try and balance the two sides and make everything finish at roughly the same point, but it could probably be done better. Acade stuff should probably be over on the left really with the posts/blogs/groups down the right.
Thanks. Yes....it's basically made up of a modified NEWS module. I created a custom wrapper and then removed all the tborders and alts etc from the main block. Then mucked about with the styling a bit. Finally I added a JOIN to the query in the php module to pull the name of the forum (as that didn't seem to be there). Also added a line to use the vB date format to allow to me to put the date and time in without using the phrase, (not sure actually why it doesn't use the vB date format by default).
But with a lot less queries! (Sorry, sorry.... I couldn't resist. OK, I'll be quiet on that subject again.)