style

This post is part of an ongoing series called Ask Jeff. This is where I’ll take a question someone within the WPTavern or WordPress community gives me and provide my thoughts/answer to. This question was submitted by Rob.

How did you get the vBulletin template so similar to your main site. Like header and footer wise?

Well Rob, the hard part was getting the WPTavern site design to a point where I could stop focusing on the actual design. So, I opted for this brown and reddish color scheme. Thankfully though, I was in luck as I found a vBulletin style that pretty much matched the design of the website. The style is called gfx_v3BrownGold and can be located for purchase at GFXStyles.com. I removed most of the images and replaced the containers with CSS colors. I also edited the header file so I could add the same links to the forum header that are the same as on the blog. The background for the forum is the same as the site which was just a CSS edit for the background property in the style. The header is not exactly the same as the site since it does not stretch across the entire page. It doesn’t stretch because of the way the style has been coded but it’s close enough for me.

To make a long story short, I designed the site first, then found a style that was as close as I could find to the site design. I then replaced images, deleted images, and edited the forum styles CSS until I got it matching pretty close to the site. It took me about 30-45 minutes to edit the forum style to match the site which at the time, I was really thankful for.

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Today I wanted to talk about a problem which Justin Tadlock will be covering in more detail at some point in the future and that is, plugins which contain a CSS file to edit their style. Don’t get me wrong, Lester Chen is a great plugin author, but I find it increasingly annoying that after I make the necessary styling changes to his WP-PageNavi plugin so that it blends in with my theme, I overwrite those changes once I upgrade his plugin.

Based on what I’ve been told, it’s fairly easy to add a plugins stylesheet to your themes CSS file so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. But, I wanted to raise the question if whether or not plugins should come with their own CSS file for editing or just store the styling information in the database so that end users don’t have to worry about messing around with the CSS in the first place? I’m pretty sure this is how Lester’s WP-Polls plugin works as I can define from within the plugin options page which colors the voting bars should be via hexadecimal color codes.

What are the drawbacks to storing plugin style information in the database versus a CSS file? On the surface, seems like adding the style information right into the plugins options table in the database is A OK to do.

Ask Jeff: How Did You Get The vBulletin Template So Similar To Your Main Site?

Submit Your Question:

Plugin Style Settings – Database Or CSS?