February 9, 2007Using more than one style? Why?
Comments (2) I will admit that I’ve never understood the need for having more than one style. To me if you are setting up a board as part of a site, or as the entire site, then you want your board style (template) to match your site. And unless you’re going to allow a user (or visitor) to change the style of your entire site, why would you bother?
Maybe I feel this way because site styling is not my strongest attribute. I can do okay, as long as you want something fairly simple. I offer web design services but they’re mostly based around my skills as a php/MySQL coder, rather than my elete skills (not l33t ski1z 
) as a graphic designer. But here’s my point, in a nutshell: your web design should reflect the style and personality and purpose of your site. Unless you have a psychotic web site, why would you need more than one style?
Not to mention that having multiple styles causes havoc with the MODding process, since you have to modify more than one file for the same function. In addition to the extra work, some styles are much more diverse than others… MOD installation instructions for subSilver (the required template) may not even work for your other styles! Suppose you have two or three of those, and a simple MOD install can easily turn into an afternoon of struggles.
In all of the sites that I have built around phpBB, not a single one of them has ever offered more than one style choice to the users. And I don’t envision that changing. 
As always, I welcome your (non-spam) comments or thoughts on this matter.
Comments (2)
Not all forums are part of a site. Some sites are nothing but a forum. And these are the kind of sites where I guess people like to have a new style to look at every so often *shrugs*
I think different color schemes are always nice, which will of course be a lot easier (and far more common) with phpBB 3
Either way, each to their own, and I guess it’s quite cool that there are enough cool styles that they want to have them to choose from on their forum
Comment by Thatbitextra — February 10, 2007 @ 3:33 pm
Why am I not surprised to see a styles team member supporting the use of multiple styles?
Welcome, Thatbitextra, to my blog, and thank you for your comment. I am, of course, poking fun at you and don’t mean any offense. Your point is appropriate, of course. There are probably plenty of folks out there that like having multiple themes. On my very first board I had subSilver, subRed, subGreen, and subSomethingICannotRemember all installed. But at the same time I was diving headlong into MODding and quickly found that it was not productive to have to maintain more than one theme.
As I got more sophisticated (in a manner of speaking) at building sites around phpBB it quickly became apparent that having multiple themes was not appropriate. It just boggles my mind when someone posts about having five, six, or even more themes available. I don’t remember going to many boards that offer multiple themes myself.
One thing that I did for my biggest board was offer users the opportunity to select from multiple graphic sets. As an example I have a set of winter holiday seasonal smilies, along with a different board logo. I also have a Halloween set. Both the winter and Halloween sets are the same used at phpbb.com; I didn’t create them. But rather than copy out the new images myself I leave it up to my users. It’s a simple MOD, really. Just allows the user to select a “seasonal graphics set” which appends an extra bit to the theme images path. So instead of templates/subSilver/images/icon_biggrin.gif it becomes templates/subSilver/images/winter/icon_biggrin.gif if they have selected that option. Works very well.
But the fact that I feel that way doesn’t require the rest of the world to follow my lead, of course.
Thanks again for your feedback.
Do you think there would be any interest in the seasonal graphics set MOD if I were to write it up?
Comment by dave.rathbun — February 10, 2007 @ 4:51 pm