My aims of this is to experiment on ipb’s template is to see how far can the ipb template stretch before it breaks. *sounds like stretch amstrong doll :P*. We are going to look at my forth coming website icelabz and see what we can customise and what we can’t. *to tell you the truth it will be sort of leihu’s forum anatomy but totally a real experiment on IPB’s template system*

Currently from browsing several skin sites for ipb a lot of the customisation is just a css+image, header & footer edits. Which when combined makes a beautiful template. But  customisation to me means editing the forums template so much that it doesn’t look like ipb from far.

why try to remake ipb’s template?
Simple reason is that I am fed up with following what other people are doing. I want something fresh, hip and well design. Also it angers me that a lot of big companies who invest a lot of money into their site don’t bother to customise IPB to suit into their main sites theme.
In this entry I will be starting on reconstruction of ipb’s template. This will be the first part of many while I log my development on rebuilding the template from scratch.

First like always I have redone some of the main layouts to my taste. Below is a screenshot of the index of my forum. As you can see the header has been trimmed and changed to make it simple. Aswell as the forum list have been converted to a non tabular display so that it is just simple. I moved all the useful content to one side of the page to keep the users eye off the stats. This was done so that new users doesn’t get discourage by statistics of the site. *Accoriding to one of the articles found on this web site* The reason being that it is discouraging is that most users want to get some feedback from a lot of users around the clock and instantly. Sadly this is not quite possible on fresh n new websites as there would only be a few users on it.

Next i changed the way the list of topics are been displayed to something similar to the forum list but with a few more details added.

As you can see above the announcement list is displayed really nicely and simple. As we just need to know the title, who posted in and when. I also made it noticeable as it might be quite important to users as it is an annoucement after all. Next I seperated the pinned topics from the list of topics as shown to emphasis that those topics are important. The only thing missing from it is the ability to see which posts are closed, open, you posted in & which one is under moderation.

Conclusion

Well as this is my first attempt at this I feel that ipb’s template bit lacks quite a lot of customisation template bits to allow me to edit individual bits. For example there should have been an option to allow you to have alternating background color for the topic entry.

After designing the forum list and topic list I feel quite unhappy on how the topic list are being displayed, I think that I will redesign that section to also include the things I mentioned above.

On the next entry I will hopefully get to finish some editing on the topic list and get a start on board stats.