What's your opinion on the vBulletin 4 style?

You know, the CSS driven one that's been shown in some of the official blog entries on the official site, and the one a certain site tried to make a vBulletin 3 replica version of?

I personally like it, to the most degree, but think the images really, really need an overhaul (and as someone said on .com, I hope Internet Brands are going to use the mock ups as a base, not just use the exact same current images as resized).

What's your opinion on the style?

Note: This is not to be ruined with licensing or other vBulletin 4 discussions, and keep it somewhat civil, I've had enough of that at their official support forums.

 

To be honest I prefer the existing style. I'm not really a fan of the whole "modern" layout thing. Not just with vBulletin, but with IPB's newest default style, I don't know what it is but I'm just not really a fan.

It's definitely good, but not really my kinda thing.

 

To the most part I like it - I agree the images could use an over-haul and some other modifications made but the most part I like!

 

Would you happen to have a link to the blog you are talking about where we can see this?

If that is allowed?

 

vBulletin - vBulletin 4 Announcements and News

 

Thank you SO much. I love vBulletin and all the info they give us! I did not even know this existed.

 

I do think it's a slight improvement over the current default, but I'm still not a big fan. Even if I liked it a lot I'd still be looking for other templates though, so it isn't a big deal.

 

More precisely, this is the style entry, since it's kind of hard to find on the vBulletin 4 official page:

First Look: The vBulletin 4.0 Style - vBulletin Community Forum

I'm curious to some of the people who like or dislike it... can you give reasons why?

 

idk...i kinda like it...its refreshing ya know...

but i'll prolly just stay with 3.7.4 since its working fine...

 

Here are a few of my observations after being neck-deep in vBulletin 4 templates for the last couple of months.

1. It is expected that end-users will change the status images, smilies, post icons, etc... So they are not a big concern at this moment. Maybe during beta when there is time then they could be updated.

2. I am not a big fan of the header and navigation and the blue that is being used. We used to joke that vBulletin 4 would have less purple than ever. But I think its more purplish than vB 3.X. Of course purple has always been a vBulletin signature color and I can change that. Its even easier now because users don't need to change images to have new gradient colors...

3. Since vBulletin 4 is stuck in XHTML 1 and CSS 2.1 land, it should have more classes for easier manipulation of the style. Something one will just have to get used to. It does take advantage of first-child and other selectors in a few places but it isn't as indepth as it could be.

4. There are no images used for buttons like "New Thread", "New Post", "Add Album", etc... However these action buttons are more consistent across all areas of the product and can be easily styled with colors and background images. Having them as text buttons makes them a lot easier to translate as well.

5. People who don't know HTML and CSS are going to have a steeper learning curve when adding new styles. This happens when the code doesn't follow the logical flow of how it appears on the screen. Some areas have floating containers where the right column is coded before the left column.

6. Some people will have trouble adapting to the new conditional and variable syntax which is less forgiving than it is currently. Scope on variables is a lot tighter as well.

Overall, the vB 4.0 style is really no more "Web 2.0" than the current one. Web 2.0, is less about looks and more about how an application works. A lot of it is a new veneer on existing tools. I'd expect to see a lot of the functionality change since we have not one but two UI specialists on the team now. One of whom used to work for Sony Games. But that won't happen until 4.1.

 

To be fair, while you're right about the smilies and post icons, it's not something to rely on for other images. Why? Because vBulletin 4 is new software, it's going on completely new template code, and the images are all different. Many people use downloadable styles and bought ones, right? Those will take some time to update, so a lot of people will probably be using the defaults as placeholders for a while, even those who make their own images. Some new and decent ones are probably going to make the end users happier in the meantime.

I didn't know it looked that purple, it looked more dark blue to me. But still.

Yes, it's too early, but I'm curious about this point. We've not seen much on the CSS yet (we'll need to wait until beta testing begins to know what it's like), but I can't say that point sounds too inspiring, coming from staff before anyone else has even seen the CSS;

That's interesting, and I think that's going to be the main reason the defaults have been decent, because it's going to take some getting used to for the style makers.

Interesting. I assume changing images and stuff will be still be easy enough though, and that things like colours can still be changed through the admin cp, right? I hate how Wordpress and such do this to be honest.

I didn't know you have two UI specialists working there now. Awesome, since the current vBulletin layout needs quite a bit of improvement in terms of useability and what not, and definitely needs some features and stuff brought to more prominence (see blogs, social groups, albums, etc).

 

Peronsally, I think the design is lame, and a 14 year old could have done it, And the worst part about it, it isn't anything thing you couldn't have done easily in vBulletin 3.x.

Other than that, I dont have access/knowledge of any the features to comment on. I don't forsee much happiness from the vBulletin community once its released. Especially if the learning curve is steeper than that of the 3.x series, go look how many basic questions are posted about that a day.

 

I liked the way the style was turning out last time i viewed. Enough for me to even comment. We all know it's nothing spectacular though because if it's one thing you'll get from jelsoft is a style inferior to other forum scripts and graphics that are so user unfriendly to manage. Don't expect the style to be something outstanding, it won't. visually, I think it's better, cleaner and somwhat lighter than the vb3.

IPB have always graced their customers with a clean uptodate style. We'll see if there are any changes towards the latter stages of development with regards to the visuals.

Anyway, anyone in the right mind won't even be using the default for long. Sure, it's new and people will like the change but before long the custom styles will certainly be applied by customers.

 

Well in my opinion the default style doesn't need to be so up2date just that it should be easy to changes like vb4 will now be with CSS based themes.

The default vBulletin style isn't supposed to be used so why put down alot of work on it when its not needed to be more then an simple style?

 

In order to truly comment on the appearance of this newly designed appearance, I'd need to use the software for a specific period of time. From what I've seen, however, it looks quite clean (and also organized).

 

I'm not sure what this post is really saying. If you mean it's not supposed to be used by forums and they need to change it and what not, that's generally true, but still, a good default style will works wonders for their official sites (which can't really have custom styles), and for the boards that are in the middle of updating their custom styles for vBulletin 4. First expressions are important for new vBulletin customers.

Hopefully everyone will be able to use it relatively soon, at least because the beta stage, even though apparently closed still allows the users to have it running on live forums. As alpha is about a week, then the beta version and possibility of seeing it on vBulletin.com and such like shouldn't be that far away either.

 

It looks nice. It's hard to tell without actually using it, but I think it is somewhat of an improvement of the current default style.

This worries me. The easiest way for me to learn and navigate the templates is to have the code on the left of my screen and the outcome on the right side and be able to find the code about or near where it appears on the actual page. (Hopefully that made some sense). Your last sentence is exactly what I mean.

As cheat-master mentioned in the original post, there is a 3.8 version of the 4.0 style available. It's fairly accurate (based on just screenshots): http://www.adminaddict.net/forum/vbulletin/vbulletin-4-style-3-8-a-2349/

 

Well!!..I actually like some of the new inproved features...looks a lot crisper and neat...but it would be good to have a play with a demo site..