For several months, I’ve been working on and off in my free time on developing a small Web site for a shareware developer, and part of that process has, recently, entailed trying to construct a reasonably attractive user forum using phpBB. This free community software is impressively powerful, but after having spent several hours today trying to make sense of its template construction, I have to say that it’s a mess. Have a look at the source code on a phpBB board and you’ll see a soup of embedded styles and nested tables that is mind-numbingly confusing to get through, to say nothing of the style sheet, which raises organizational distraction to an art.
After much effort, I think I was able to wrestle the styles into a reasonably presentable shape, though because of the sheer effort, I had given up on the idea of trying to do anything remotely innovative with the layout. To be fair, I was editing the default templates, and if I had had the time to rebuild templates from scratch, I probably would have been much better off. Who has that kind of time, though? At any rate, I hope to reveal the fruits of my labor sometime this week