[Darth-Apple]

Personally, I'm a bit divided over it. It is very simple and clean, but it is too outdated for me to really use on one of my forums. At the same time, it is good for support forums and for theme designers. It is very easy to modify, so it saves me time when I design themes.

What's your opinion?

[simlink]

With a bit of modernising (CSS buttons, new thead, tfoot, tcat, etc. and new icons and graphics) it wouldn't be bad. Slap a custom menu bar onto it and you're good to go. But alone by itself? Ick.

[Darth-Apple]

With a bit of modernising (CSS buttons, new thead, tfoot, tcat, etc. and new icons and graphics) it wouldn't be bad. Slap a custom menu bar onto it and you're good to go. But alone by itself? Ick.

It would be a completely different theme by then.

[spork985]

I like it. It's very clean and not over done.

[simlink]

It would be a completely different theme by then.

We'll I'm mostly talking removing image-based theads, etc. and changing the colour slightly. There's nothing wrong with the post-bits, etc. It just needs a small patch-work.

[Darth-Apple]

It would be a completely different theme by then.

We'll I'm mostly talking removing image-based theads, etc. and changing the colour slightly. There's nothing wrong with the post-bits, etc. It just needs a small patch-work.

I'm actually working on something like that now in my "theme desk". I'm not expecting it to be super-amazing or anything since I'm trying to avoid template edits, but I'd like to see what's possible.

[simlink]

Well, a lot is possible just removing images for thead and using plain code CSS. CSS buttons are not possible w/o template edits, however.

[Darth-Apple]

I'm not really worried about minor template edits for CSS buttons and all that. I'm just trying to avoid redoing the entire page layout, etc...

[simlink]

Yea, for the most part I think that is fine on the default. The only majour edit I would do is to the welcome block to sort of clean it up, but I suppose that is possible with just some CSS to spruce the look up. Otherwise you are going less an edit of the original and more a big redo of it.

[Kyng]

2020 + Non-responsive = Hate.

Not bad in its day; however, "its day" is long gone now.

[Guardian]

Yeah, I go with hate it. I don't know why effort doesn't go to making a simple but aesthetic theme, for any MyBB release. Just IMO.

[Darth-Apple]

The theme they used was based on Apart Night from way back in the day. It was the most popular theme on the 1.6.x release, but that was made before people truly got a feel for the capability of MyBB.

At the time, people were amazed that you could take a forum that looked like it was made in the 90s and turn it into something that looked like IPB. Today, people use myBB for that purpose all the time (it's the perfect software to theme the living daylights out of), but as always, it remains years behind out of the box.

People don't ever really use MyBB for its default theme, so I'm okay with it ultimately. However, not being responsive (as @Kyng mentioned) means that most user themes aren't responsive either. We made our theme from scratch and had to do responsiveness manually on an entirely table-based design. It's nowhere near complete. It's enough to get by, but doing it entirely from scratch is a nightmare.

[Kyng]

The theme they used was based on Apart Night from way back in the day. It was the most popular theme on the 1.6.x release, but that was made before people truly got a feel for the capability of MyBB.

At the time, people were amazed that you could take a forum that looked like it was made in the 90s and turn it into something that looked like IPB. Today, people use myBB for that purpose all the time (it's the perfect software to theme the living daylights out of), but as always, it remains years behind out of the box.

People don't ever really use MyBB for its default theme, so I'm okay with it ultimately. However, not being responsive (as @Kyng mentioned) means that most user themes aren't responsive either. We made our theme from scratch and had to do responsiveness manually on an entirely table-based design. It's nowhere near complete. It's enough to get by, but doing it entirely from scratch is a nightmare.

Yeah, I can imagine >_< . When I first started using MyBB, I planned to create my own set of responsive templates; however, I soon realised just how much work that would be, and scrapped the project. 

I just ended up using BootBB as a base for my responsive themes, since that's available for free under a relatively permissive CC BY-SA 3.0 licence. Not perfect by any means, but again, it's enough to get by.

[Darth-Apple]

I love the approach you used at TCH @Kyng. I’ve never seen a website use this approach of diversifying themes based on a single base before. We ended up taking some inspiration from the idea and started making a couple new color schemes of existing themes here.

Our responsiveness is workable at best. We’ve done so from scratch. If 1.9 is further delayed, we may end up finding a permissive theme as you’ve done and port our design to it. We are primarily waiting to see what happens with MyBB 1.9 first.

It’s difficult to diversify designs because, on one hand, the design of a website is its character in a sense and speaks to what it is and its identity. However, no single design can meet the goals of every user’s preference either, and it’s never good to force one single look and feel on every user of any service.

[Kyng]

I love the approach you used at TCH @Kyng. I’ve never seen a website use this approach of diversifying themes based on a single base before. We ended up taking some inspiration from the idea and started making a couple new color schemes of existing themes here.

Our responsiveness is workable at best. We’ve done so from scratch. If 1.9 is further delayed, we may end up finding a permissive theme as you’ve done and port our design to it. We are primarily waiting to see what happens with MyBB 1.9 first.

It’s difficult to diversify designs because, on one hand, the design of a website is its character in a sense and speaks to what it is and its identity. However, no single design can meet the goals of every user’s preference either, and it’s never good to force one single look and feel on every user of any service.

Well, I'm glad you like it - and I'll look forward to seeing your new colour schemes  ! 

I'll admit that our responsive themes aren't very stylistically consistent with one another - but then, stylistic consistency was never really my goal: like you say, no single design can meet every user's preferences.

[Darth-Apple]

I agree. Lain has also been working on some interesting things behind the scenes for some time. He’s got the color picker that will eventually be ported to all of the designs. It will be huge once it’s available across the board. It already works very well in the dark theme dev version.

[Kim Winchester]

I personally like it. Its very colorful and simple.