Which forum script do you think is easiest to style/modify and which is the hardest and why? Personally, I'd say vBulletin 3 or 4 is probably still the easiest to style and the likes of phpBB is likely the hardest (due to having no plugin/import system). As for IPB and XenForo, I'd say they're a bit mixed in this respect. For the former it's got a really nice plugin system with a lot of great features, but the actual code quality of the CSS is... extremely poor to say the least and almost a nightmare to modify (made worse by how the visual skin editor just duplicates all the classes at the bottom, then changes the minor values and pastes '!important' at the end instead of actually editing the standard CSS). And for XenForo, while it does have a nice plugin system and easy page adder... is ruined by how damn 'fancy' they tried to make the actual template code. As in, it uses all the latest CSS and HTML 'standards', but ends up being really hard for a less experienced developer or mom and pop group to edit as a result (especially with stuff like CSS sprites). So what forum software do you think is easiest and hardest to style and why?
I think it depends on the person to be honest... I came from a background of phpBB styles, which I loved to style for as it was one style sheet(normally) header/footer edits and small other changes. I also styled vB 3/4 series a bit too which was alright. However since XenForo launched and I got my hands on it I fell in love with the styling system it has. It's definitely not complicated at all once you learn it, and it's not a large learning curve for it either. I've tried to touch IPB in the past but never stayed logged in for longer than 10 minutes heh, just wasn't my thing.
IPB is by far the hardest, for me. Xenforo is the easiest, and vBulletin is about in the middle between the other two. Those are the three I've the most experience with.
Of all the template engines I know of, I found MyBB to have the lowest learning curve among any of them. However, they lack things such as template hooks and such, and a lot of plugins end up having a find/replace workaround which sometimes breaks.
I think, WBB3 is the easiest one to style, especialle if you want to have more than one style for your forum. Forumotion software is also easy to style, but there are so few functions. I tested a VB3.8, and this was not as easy to style as the WBB i'm using now. I only was in the ACP of those three forum softwares, so I have to say that WBB is the easiest and VB3.8 is the hardest, but maybe a phpBB or IPB is harder than VB.
I thought the same at first, but once that you start trying out, it's not that hard. Of course, plugins and mods can facilitate the task, but I found that is possible doing it from scratch using a regular HTML editor. Main problem however are those scripts that store the skins/themes into the database. I remember how it sucked work on IBP having the skins into the skins directory, but changes stored in the database. Just a little mistake and everything can be messed up.
vBulletin 3 was the absolute easiest. xenForo has a bit of a learning curve and I am still not that great at modifying it. Never messed with IPB or anything else other than phpBB.
