bBulletin 4

[DannyGSmith]

I need to style a forum, and have been looking for the css files in vain. Do you use some type of templating engine? I am waiting for my login to be enabled at vbulletin.org, looks like the best place to find information. Anyone else here played with it?

[Jeffro]

I'm guessing you're talking about vBulletin 4 and not bbulletin lol. Anywho, Vbulletins style system is a bit wonky and relies mostly on stylevars and not so much on plain CSS files. Within a vBulletin theme, if it were done properly, you would be able to change the way theme looks and operates via the style editor and editing the style vars. In my case however, I was using a theme prior to version 4 being released and ended up making changes to the pure CSS files themselves. Sure, I get warnings about updating template files but since the changes are to the pure CSS files I edited, I just ignore them.

All of the CSS files for editing will be found within the style editor.

[DannyGSmith]

Yes you are right, wrong key it is vBulletin. It seems to me a like a program that has feature creep to the point it is a nightmare. I have finally gotten the hang of it, but it not something on a regular basis. I suspect part of it is so they can obfuscate the call home if you try to put it on the wrong domain.

[Jeffro]

There are quite a few things I like about vBulletin but many that I don't like. The interface for the back end is god awful. Terrible, every other bad word that I can think of. It's the furthest thing from intuitive. Not sure when they will ever update it to make it easier and more modern. On the other hand, I'm only using 2 or 3 extensions while the rest of this forum is vanilla features which is pretty darn nice. The one thing I love the most about the software is the ability to turn on AJaX admin options so I can perform most admin tasks on the front-end without page reloads and such. I will most likely miss that the most when I migrate to bbPress

[DannyGSmith]

I agree about the front-end. They have no competition there both as a user, and as a moderator, no one else has all the tools they have. I guess I just needed to vent.

[PressedIn]

As someone who has worked with vBulletin for years (prior to Jelsoft selling out), I've always had a gripe about the visual appearance of the backend. I guess I've been using WordPress for so long and am used to the clean look and feel that something with that much bold color throws me for a loop :).

That said, I've always wondered why vBulletin didn't use stylesheets by default and not style variables. It's much easier to just edit a CSS file over having to search around.

[Jeffro]

Who knows why they chose to go the hard way instead of the easy way. One thing that makes vBulletin a giant pain in the ass is the constant style updates with just about every release. Terribly annoying.