I suggested this for PHPBB3 too. The story is this. Today I wanted to make a PHPBB3 theme for my forum. So I went and played around the with the skin system. It looked simple, but how they have it set up is quite hard to mange.

My idea to their team was to create a skin maker which you can say were you want things in the template. Edit the colours. Then edit the images then package it up download it then upload it to your site.

It would be nice if NextBBS had something like this too. As it would see much more skins been made.

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( Trinest.Com )

Personally I think that would be a bad idea, I think it would encourage too many people who lack the ability to work things out for themselves or people who are too lazy to figure out things for themselves to host websites. Personally I am already tired of seeing poorly designed sites, free forums, and other cms tha have been installed usually to free servers, by folk, usually young teenagers who havent got a clue how the internet works, who dont even have knowlege of basic html or php, running these things rather poorly with some skin they made in a skin making facility.

It kind of defeats the object of css really, css despite being simple with a significant ammount of effort can be a powerful tool, a skin editing tool such as that, would not be able to fully customise and take advantage of css to make skins that look too good. And when things are too easy like that, anybody and everybody starts to do it. Just imagine, everyone who has access to the internet trying to make sites with forums on, using simple WYSIWIG type editors. The entire internet would become the new piczo, which if you havent heard of it is a poorly coded site that allows people to sign up and create sites using their WTSIWIG style drag and drop system, usually these sites are for people own personal ego. hey look a whole site about me.

Appologies for the rant but I just think this is a very bad idea.

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While I see why you hate it. I belive your just don't understand. If the creator wasn't as complicated. But easy and simple to understand if people mastered it it would make better designs not worse.

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( Trinest.Com )

I could not agree more, the point of having more themes and making it easier to create them would entice more users to use nextbbs. I have been trying to hack a theme for some days now, and am starting to get frustrated.

The theme I have been trying to port is this www.1234.info/webtemplates/ called multiflex

trinest wrote:

While I see why you hate it. I belive your just don't understand. If the creator wasn't as complicated. But easy and simple to understand if people mastered it it would make better designs not worse.

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Well, I would really like more information on what you guys find frustrating.
I am currently working on a portal creation tool and it certainly would make sense for nBBS to evolve towards more intuitive editing.

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