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Told you so .. I never update the blog when I should. It’s been 20 days and nothing … shame on me …

So that you don’t think I was asleep all this time: I made another theme for phpBB, USB theme used in a live environment here. The admin made some small tweaks (placed a welcome message and changed the ad banner) .. I am pleased to see it used, and I have to confess, with all my non-existent modesty, that it does look superbe

I also worked a lot on a new forum of mine, Morrowind.ro

It needed a new theme since the old one was plain horrid. When I started the project I was alone in the forums and since I do have many others to think about I just let it as it was. But it did got a facelift so that it does look as I think such a forum should look. We have a very good Google placement (I think the Able-to-Know mod for phpBB is indeed very good) and I see an increase in traffic and posting.

The problem is that Morrowind has a lot of quests and we also talk about the new game, Oblivion, so that means less time for me on Wtricks, more time on creating content for the new baby …

I have made it as a good habit to create something at least once a week. It seems like I was able to make new things for the downloads section 2-3 times a week, but as time passes I need to work on other things too, not just the downloads.

2 days ago I posted at TAZ an announcement that I am willing to create some graphics and even theme for the people who need them. I already got some requests and the new phpBB theme I created was made for this. It’s a forum about TV shows, so I thought a skin with an old TV on it would be pretty fancy.

I also made the main table sit in a TV like border .. some would find this nice. I hope

I also created new buttons and everything is at display on our phpBB test link. The bad thing is that in order to preview the themes one must be logged in. I have created an account and it’s easy to use: username test, password test. Otherwise the skin change won’t work. Don’t ask me why, I wasn’t able to make it work. Yesterday I spent 5 hours installing some hacks to do this but none works. I was very ..ssed as you can imagine.

This is how the forums would look.

For the people who want the skin: here is the download page.

I was also a good girl and packed the button sets from this theme and the games theme. I thought some people might want them separate too:

And the game theme buttons; not too pretty in my opinion, but still good to use

Today I feel in the mood to post, so I shall let the muse lead me

I realised few hours ago that even if my writings here were of any interest to anyone, they still need to be found by that person (hope there would be more than 1 person). So, I started paying more attention to the “blog promotion” ideas in some of the forums I post.

I got a series of links to some blog promotion places and submitted the link to few of them. Don’t know what to write there anyway .. I don’t think too many of the things I write here are of interest since I’m not such a satyrical person nor this topic such an interesting one. Anyway, I started working on some promotion.

I also installed Analytics for this blog only to see what results I have after this promotion work.

I was reminded by a coleague that I need to do some updates on her site, SportVest. I kinda forgot it, but today she was able to send me the pdf file for the magazine, so I uploaded it and made some updates on the site. I would have to work some more, but I promised myself I’d sleep early as I tried to for the last days. And it’s working. Instead of being as tired as I usualy am, today I was feeling very well. So, if it’s working, why not keep up the good sleeping schedule?

Please read the article HERE

I think many people would have expected me to try something else too. Those who know me are already familiar with the fact I like to take any new challenge, and modding a myBB theme was a sure one.

As other forums the script is similar too, the theme is modded from the admin panel. That means you need to look for each code bit and change, hit submit and then open the page again, look for some more code and so on. That kinda leaves out the find/replace option I use a lot when modding an external CSS.

I wasn’t yet able to spot a way to have both defaul and unique theme on the forums, so I just overwrote the initial images. I don’t think I’d create a new MyBB theme too soon, since I don’t know how to use the theme options to have both of them shown

My impression: BAD. The script is OK, many features and for an admin that’s not such a serious modder as I am the script could actually be good. The div only template is also hard to understand for me, so I stick with the scripts that rely on tables to compose the theme.

Anyway .. here’s the masterpiece. As any other releases here, it’s free to use:

And the download page.

Today, as I woke up and hit the forums I thought I should start creating something new in the buttons division. I already had 2 sets of buttons for vBulletin, but not all people use this. I copied the default buttons in phpBB and started working on them.

I called it Classy because it’s quite an elegant button set.

Then I posted the link and preview in other forums I am member in to hear some feed-back. It looks like people like the buttons .. I am glad and hope they’d be used to beautify more and more forums.

After posting in the forums and wasting time with lunch and the family I felt inspired again. I wanted to create a myBB set of buttons and since I have it installed in a test forum (for a future unique theme) I also created some buttons:

The downloads page

I am prepared now to work even more on myBB and maybe deliver an unique theme for it, but the problem is that the script is horrid when it comes to theme modding. I hate anything that’s not as simple and forward as phpBB. I like to see my file as the tpl files in phpBB entirely with the code and separate CSS. How am I supposed to create some outstanding themes when I spend most of my time trying to find the code bits I need to modify?

I have installed the script for some good days and my first meeting with Wordpress wasn’t that pleasant .. I was a bit put off by the css only driven layout. Of course it’s more elegant this way and it’s the ‘future’ but pardon me if I tell you that I am still a table person. And that’s mainly because my designs are not “change a colour here and an image there”, but usually mean a brand new layout created on Photoshop I need to code then into the site.

I made some fast changes when installing the blog so that we can have it working on the main theme Wtricks has, but that was all. I still had it shown weird in IE and not look as I wanted it to look.

So .. I just spent some nice time on the weekend creating some tables to put the content and stripping down the CSS to make the site look as it does now. I also placed some adsense code and tried to check some of the links to be functional.

I am sure some of the people who made the script would die to see how I vandalised it, but it’s OK for me now.

I also tried to install some modifications on it and failed miserably. They don’t function, they don’t even have a good readme file to document them in the downloaded package. I have to say that i don’t like Wordpress and would uninstall it in an instant if I wasn’t that stubborn. I need to learn more about it so that I can still “win” something from this.