Style Variable Editor is Horrible!

[Archaic]

While I do appreciate the power of the StyleVars system, I really don't understand why they couldn't have retained something similar to the older system for the non-advanced users as well. Heck, even just something to easily convert old colour schemes over from vB3 to vB4 would be fine.

[Wildcard29]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I just had a look at the vB4 admin and it looks like you can just remove the CSS imports from the templates as they're placed on the individual pages (Forumhome, Showthread etc). So what you could do is copy the old CSS (view source in browser) to newly created static files and then edit those. This way you could just get busy with the CSS and forget about the whole new styling system, which is quite a dissapointment I must add.

[tassoman]

Use firebug on page background, you'll find vbulletin_html #id but any chance to find it into the dumb stylevar editor.
Dumbest thing it's the most complicated ... That weird... Old editor was the most user friendly, more than editing by hand csses and making cut and paste to get childrens -_-

[Al Zander]

If someone codes an old-skool style easier to understand plug-in for the stylevars and releases it on a few bucks-pay-per d/l, they'll be rich in weeks. That's a fact.

For now, the firebug + tips method does well for anyone who can spare the time and patience.

[DT1014]

What a complete disaster. I wish we could use the old editor... at least to be able to EASILY change the general look / color scheme. This is one thing that was not thought through.

[cubdriver]

It would be nice to be able to export the style, edit it outside of VB, and then import it again. However, the xml file that exports is gobbledegook to me, but maybe I'm just an idiot.

sj

[MiG Slayer]

I haven't found the StyleVar editor to be too terribly bad. The first style I converted from 3 to 4 (see my sig block) took a long time, but subsequent ones came simply enough. The real problem seems to be that a lot of StyleVars are missing from the editor. For example, I can't seem to be able to change certain parts of the user CP or private messaging inbox (among others). That is extremely frustrating. The editor itself is not a pain to use, though, and in the long run should provide greater flexibility and control versus the old system even if it is a bit more complicated.

[Ted S]

Agreed with all comments on the style editor...

Some nice changes in vb4 but styling is not one of them. Making things more modular is great, making a system with some variables listed, some not, and a very complex sorter hinders personalizing forums which means less growth.

[Trekkan]

StyleVars System is so bad
We need an option let us adding Extra CSS and Additional CSS .. this will make the StyleVars System ideal

I hope that from vb team

There's a mod on vb.org from Lynne that adds in the additional CSS stuff, that might help a little anyway. But yeah, the current "system" really works like a crappy "hack" than anything else. So far as I can tell, the styling system is the largest failure of vB4. I'm sure it'll get better as time goes on, but I think they seriously underestimated what styling means to us.

[elektrobank]

Can you explain how do you do this? It doesn't seem like the class names match up with the style variables.

Overall I think the new version from the client perspective is fine, the UI refinements are nice. However from an admin/developer standpoint it's an absolute nightmare! Whoever designed the admin portion must be out of their mind to think any of this is intuitive at all. This really has the feel of an open source project, not something that I'd pay for.

The way I do is:
1. I find the css class using firebug
2. I search for the css class and find the variables inside it.

[assaf]

StyleVars System is so bad
We need an option let us adding Extra CSS and Additional CSS .. this will make the StyleVars System ideal

I hope that from vb team

[cbiweb]

Someone mentioned above about using Firebug, and in many case not even that helps. I'm banking on the fact that the stylevar/CSS system isn't finalized yet, and we'll see a much better implementation in the future. Hopefully. Fingers and toes crossed.

[thedudleys]

im looking over the stylevar stuff and its really confusing compared to 3.8 where its simple and clean along with 1 simple css for the whole site, but now you got like 100 css' to edit plus the templates which seem to be more encoded rather than simple.

[Pelacat]

Cant agree more with him. Its a waste of time, im not really impressed with the new stuff that makes even more painful for developers.

Right now im just editing the css templates, the only way i'd get things faster using firebug.

[Nestor]

One other thing that comes to mind, how many queries have to be perfomed to fill out the values of the various style sheets with the values in the stylevars? As oppsed to just delivering a straight out style sheet via html with no database queries involved. This is one feature that should be seriously reconsidered.