Any chance of simplifying styling in future versions? :)

ibrian

ibrian

Well-known member
Coming from vb3, the xenforo styling system looks clever, but extremely user-unfriendly!

In vb3, the style page gives you the names for the CSS elements, and you can edit them directly - change colours, change font attributes, etc etc.

In xenforo - well, there's a colour palette page with no explanation of what anything might do, and pages of styling templates. It's so bad that xenforo's own help pages recommend downloading the Google chrome browser to isolate CSS elements, and then change them directly via CSS files. Which makes the point of having styling options in the admin section pretty pointless!

I'm trying to work my way through - I can change a colour on one page, but to add text styling I've got to find that value on another. If it's not visible I have to edit the CSS file on the server directly. Not a good workflow!

I appreciate I'm a new user to xenforo, others will have got used to it, and there's necessarily a learning curve - but, seriously, could you have made the styling section any more over-complicated?!

In future releases, it would be nice to have something simpler! The vb3 system took a little getting used to, but the learning curve never looked anywhere so steep!

Simply feedback. :)
 
The styling system in XenForo is the easiest i've ever come across.

Have you looked in the Style Properties - you can pretty much change anything in there... css can be edited in the EXTRA.css template (in the templates area in the ACP)
 
The color palette page is a bit rough at first. It'd be nice if each color had a list of what styles they applied to, somewhere.

The search-through-templates thing doesn't work as well as it could.

I would more like a search-through-options feature like IPB has...
 
Azhria Lilu said:
The styling system in XenForo is the easiest i've ever come across.

Have you looked in the Style Properties - you can pretty much change anything in there... css can be edited in the EXTRA.css template (in the templates area in the ACP)
Click to expand...

I mean, simple things - I'd like to change the colour of links, and have them underlined by default. I'd like to apply that to all links on the page, including board titles and nav links. But, my goodness, trying to find where all the relevant CSS is in the styling section is a challenge!

And that's just for one styling change!
 
You can grab most links with a{ } I believe, I'll have to check my styles but should be it if I remember, on my phone so can't check atm


I've worked with IPB and vB, XenForo has the best styling system by far, you can do pretty much anything you want with it.
 
ibrian said:
I mean, simple things - I'd like to change the colour of links, and have them underlined by default. I'd like to apply that to all links on the page, including board titles and nav links. But, my goodness, trying to find where all the relevant CSS is in the styling section is a challenge!

And that's just for one styling change!
Click to expand...
Everything has its own learning curve - especially when you're coming from something else. The worst thing you can do is keep making comparisons, instead just dive in and learn :)
 
Style properties general -> links :)

There's a learning curve you'll soon appreciate the power of it all.
 
You can still edit css files if you want to.

Enable debug mode, get webdav client (such as CyberDuck, though in recent versions webdav support was bugged), connect to your forum and edit css templates in your favorite editor.
 
Russ said:
Style properties general -> links :)

There's a learning curve you'll soon appreciate the power of it all.
Click to expand...
You also need to edit building blocks for Primary and Secondary Link.

Arty said:
You can still edit css files if you want to.

Enable debug mode, get webdav client (such as CyberDuck, though in recent versions webdav support was bugged), connect to your forum and edit css templates in your favorite editor.
Click to expand...

I use WebDrive which allows me to host as a virtual drive and use Sublime Text.
 
Just to add, one of the reasons I was having so many problems with styling is that I was editing two different themes which had hard coded many of the values - so no wonder I was having problems using the colour palette. :D
 
ibrian said:
the xenforo styling system looks clever, but extremely user-unfriendly!
Click to expand...

I completely take this back.

I'd customised a template by changing the hard-coded values. I knew I'd have to redo all these whenever an upgrade changed the individual templates. So I just attempted that using only the styling commands.

It was surprisingly quick and clean and easy to do.

Just required a little patience getting used to the system, that's all. :)
 
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