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ah, I see.  You guys are far more thoughtful than I'd be.  That never would have occurred to me. 

I think if the board's admin allows images, then the board's admin should be aware of the pros and cons.

If it were up to me, the [ img ] tag would just create an <img> tag, and if the layout breaks on a thread where people post desktop pics, so be it.  It's not like it makes the page less usable, it just makes that person's post ugly.

Offering up php, javascript, and css solutions is fine, but I think its extra credit.   I'd leave the image issue to those who use images.  I've seen images used on many, many message boards, and having large images stretch the page is a pain, but having a single image overflow from the layout doesn't bother me a bit, I can skip past it.

Perhaps not as elegant as you were looking for, but it's definitely less bloat.

Oh please, no!

There's not any need at all to alter the structure of the <h1>.  .punwrap h1 {} will isolate it, as will .brdtitle h1 {}

Also, I don't think in-line styles are ever a good idea, and I can't remember where, but I did encounter one instance of an inline style.  I think that all style should be separated from content so that extermal CSS can do its job without interference from style attributes.  That includes mods.  If someone creates a mod and applies inline styles to make it match Oxygen, then it's more difficult to make it look right in other themes -- or boards with user-selectable themes.

I don't see the peekabo bug anywhere Paul... some margins vanish and what not, and most of the rollovers aren't fancy in WinIE, but I don't see any obscured content.  Is there anywhere in particular you that you noticed it? 

And the default font size might be a touch small, it's noticed more among the Mac crowd probably because we typically use higher screen resolutions.  The actual size in pixels, however, is absolutely identical on both platforms.

Broken?  I understand that's it's pretty funky in IE, but I didn't think it was broken...

But given the scope of the site (MacAddict) and the age of WinIE, I don't mind that IE can't render it properly. 

Oh, and as for the criticism, they do that whenever anything changes.  Don't let it get to you.   Actually, I'll put that a better way:  Ignore the whining, only listen to constructive criticism.  That weeks about just about all of the comments right off.   (I go by registered_user over there, btw, and I'm no stranger to them whining about stuff and calling it constructive.)

Tell you what...  If you'd like, I'll happily go through some of the pages and make notes on how I'd do things, and pass that list along to you.

I think that some of the mark-up could be trimmed down, but having extra wrappers in there is a real boon to designers.  What if the designer wanted to put a shadow around each post?  Or come fancy image as a border?  As it is now, you leave open many options to the designer and that's a very good thing.  But there are perhaps a few things that I'd do differently.

I won't presume to know the mark-up or the forum as well as you do, but I'd be happy to share what I came across when trying to come up with a theme that relied more heavily on images.  From there you could go through it and implement that which you like and trash what you don't like.

I figured I'd e-mail it to you, but I can put it in a thread too if you'd prefer.

Yup, it's the clear:left that does it.

If there's one bit of advice I can offer when it comes to working with CSS it's to keep it as simple as you possibly can.  It's easy to get very complicated very quickly with CSS, and it tends to cause trouble when you do. 

the section of mark-up is here:

<div class="linkst">
    <div class="inbox">
        <p class="pagelink conl">Pages: <strong>1</strong></p>
        <p class="postlink conr"><a href="post.php?tid=5955">Post reply</a></p>
        <ul><li><a href="index.php">Index</a></li><li> » <a href="viewforum.php?id=40">PunBB discussions</a></li><li> » Changing the layout</li></ul>

        <div class="clearer"></div>
    </div>
</div>

to make it look like you're after, I think you'd need something like this (mind you I haven't tested it, and it's probably going to require some fiddling to get it right):

.linkst .inbox {
position: relative;

height: 36px;
}
.linkst .inbox p.conl {
position: absolute; 
right: 0; bottom: 0;
}
.linkst .inbox .conr {
position: absolute;
bottom: 0; left: 0;
}
.linkst .inbox .conr a {
margin: 0; padding: 0;
}

.linkst .inbox ul {
display: block
text-align: left;
margin: 0;
}

Is your server running Apache and do you have access to .htaccess?  I'm no expert on it, but I think that adding this to your .htaccess file would do it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.yourdomain.com/login/ [R,L]

It basically says that anyone coming from an address that isn't http://www.yourdomain.com/ is automagically sent to http://www.yourdomain.com/login/

It may or may not work, I'm not really that knowledgeable when it comes to this stuff.

sah-weet! 

Oh, you know, I had another thought:  If you do choose to have a style directory structure, it might be a nice touch to have the forum parse a very simple text file (included in each theme, and given a certain name and location in the style directory) to give the designer a little credit in the footer somewhere.  The text file might even be just one line, or parsed down to the first 256 characters to prevent it from being abused.  It would be a nice little nod to theme designers to have a means for them to place a small link on the bottom of the page like they can with that other forum.

Re: markup

I don't mean quirks as a bad thing, the mark-up is actually quite nice.  But there are a few areas that I find peculiar, and that's why I say "quirky."

For example, the use of non-breaking spaces.  In the <dd class="usercontacts"> there are nbsps insterted before the web address, and I'd think that semantically they might be separate definitions, but at the very least, the nbsp needn't be there, some margin or padding would do the trick just as well. 

Along the same lines, it's remarkably helpful to stylize links when either the enclosed text is wrapped in its own span or the link is wrapped in its own container.  The end result allows a designer to use the technique popularized by alistapart's sliding doors article.  I've only created one skin (and it's in progress, I'll let you know when it goes live) and I've found that most links are able to be styled with the sliding doors approach since most are in lists or other wrappers, but user contacts is a notable exception.

here's another that I find quirky:

        <div id="brdwelcome" class="inbox">
            <p class="conl">Logged in as <strong>roo</strong><br />Last visit: Today 12:50:10</p>

...
            <div class="clearer"></div>
        </div>

I think the break tag in that passage should be removed and instead have the Last visit part be wrapped in its own container.  A span or even its own paragraph.  It's workable, however.  I was able to single out that break and apply display: none; to it, but it is quirky to have a break tag sitting there for reasons that appear mostly presentational. 

I find it a little odd that there is a bar | between Report, Quote, etc.  I don't feel that it should be a part of the markup as it requires a designer to remove it if they choose an alternate means of styling that link.  The same effect can be achieved by adding border to one side of each list item, and by adding a class to either the first or last item in that list to which there is no border applied.

Also, it might be a nice feature to identify individual links.  The main nav might get an id on each <li> like <li id="index">, <li id="userlist">, etc.  The list at the bottom of each post might also be given classes <li class="report">, <li class="quote">, etc.  As it is now, I've applied different styles to each link by using css selectors that aren't supported in WinIE.  Not that I particularly care about WinIE, but having identifying attributes on those list items would make styling easier and more flexible.

Again, as it is, the markup is very workable, and the tags and classes are very well thought out and applied, but these are a few things I encountered.  Overall, it does a bang-up job of giving a designer everything he needs to style the forum, and again, I was able to work past nearly every one of these issues.  I didn't want to get into it earlier because I feel that I'm largely nit-picking, but you did ask.