Templates

Just look at the templates folder. There are the templates.
Besides from that, the next version will come with CSS full integration, which should make it much more customizable.

He is refering to the folder include/template/. In there you will find a few .tpl-files that will allow you to incorporate PunBB into your website design. However, a full-blown template system with individual templates for each part of the forum just won't happen. I've made a design choice not to include such a system and I'm sticking to it.

If PunBB had a template system, attachments, private messaging, polls etc. it wouldn't be any different or any better than all the other BB's out there. It's scaled down for a purpose you know.

But I'm only asking that a basic template system be made so that I don't have to go through the source files and replace all the code that way.

Face it. Your only hope is that somebody else will feel the same as you do and come up with an alternative release of PunBB which includes templates.

It's not the functions for loading/compiling etc. I consider a large addition to the code, it's rewriting every single script so that they utilize the templates.

You're executing no less than 8 preg_replace's for every single template and doing disk IO to load/save. I wouldn't call that fast when comparing it to direct static output. Say a page is built up of 20 templates. That equals 160 calls to preg_replace and 20 disk reads. That code will be MUCH slower than direct static output.

If I were you, I would save the compiled templates to disk and then just use include/require instead of loading them into memory and using eval(). That way PHP "accelerators" such as mmcache and Zend Optimizer can cache the PHP bytecode for the templates and your pages will generate much faster.

And how does that differ from reading the file manually and then evaling it?

Edit: *hits head* Now I see what you mean. That's true. However, your method doesn't at all take advantage of the benefits of PHP accelerators such as mmcache, PHPA and Zend Optimizer.

I never said your board was slow. I just said using templates in that matter, or any matter for that matter (no pun intended), will be a lot slower than just outputting static markup.

Also, the average loadtime for your board doesn't tell me anything. 0.025 could mean it's blistering fast, but it could also mean it's incredibly slow. Heck, I can get huge boards like vBulletin or IPB to load that fast under the right circumstances. Loadtimes are only interesting when comparing them to other boards on the same hardware and with the same data. The variables that affect loadtimes are endless. What kind of hardware the board is running on, the versions of all used tools (Apache, PHP, MySQL etc.), whether a PHP accelerator is used or not, the number of users/topics/posts in the database, the number of board features enabled, what kind of concurrency was used when running the benchmarks (i.e. what value for -c when running apachebench), etc. etc. etc.

We could talk about this forever. The fact remains: PunBB will not have a template system in any forseable future. I have to draw the line somewhere if PunBB is to remain the "faster, smaller and less graphic alternative". PunBB 2.0 (whenever that may be) will most likely be styled completely with CSS and then a template system won't be needed.

Yes you do.
http://www.csszengarden.com/
Same markup, dozens (or more) different sites.