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Just a little thing I have been working on.
http://post21.co.uk/punsg
Not quite finished yet and the idea is for users to install it on their own pc's so they can test their styles without having to install server/php/mysql.

No problem. Email it to me.

Hi CSpotKill. One thing I would say is that I am not trying to compete with your efforts. In any event, my skills are not upto it. I am just suggesting some easy to implement changes which would give end users far more options and more control via the stylsheet and hopefully streamline the markup in the process. I am actually becoming more convinced that your approach is the best way to go in the long run. Think of my suggestions as a quick fix to what I percieve as PunBB's only weakness i.e. limited styling possibilities rather than a suggested design strategy.

P.S. You should have called yourself CSpotSkill

P.P.S. I just realised I could reduce each table to two cells instead of 4 or maybe even one cell. That would enable the easy use of borders and dispose of cellspacing="1". If I float the contents of the cell it would even allow for user info and the post to be transposed right to left (do I hear the sound of 1.2 Billion Chinese cheering). In other words, use the table as no more than a rigid frame around a pure css interior.

Have to go now. Lunch break over. I seem to have an email from somebody called Yana in the Ukraine who wants to get acquainted. I think I will forward her email to that nice bunch of Nigerian bankers who have kindly offered to make me rich.

I now have each post in a separate table again but still no inner tables so thats still a decent reduction in tables. I have tested it and it works perfectly with wide posts. I will upload it after some more tinkering.

I am interested in seeing how the great CSS experiment ends up though I am not entirely optomistic largely because the only board to use pure css is a bit of a dogs breakfast and isn't even that quick. PunBB v.1.4 quite possibly, but not v.1.2. I am all in favour of designing websites using CSS but a BBS system isn't just a website, it's an interface to a database.

You might be interest in this
http://css.nu/articles/table-in-css.html
The three column example can be adapted to recreate index.php and probably viewforum.php without tables. I have tried it and came up with a reasonbly accurate rendition of index.php at least at a fixed width.

Thanks. I knew there would be problems I hadn't considered. Some more work to do then. Though I still convinced that four tables per post is overkill.

I just tried using the code tag for a long post. I doesn't actually break the the board, it just causes the whole of the table to expand rather than just one row. However, I guess most people just want the one row to expand. I still think I can get it to work with a lot less tables than used currently but we shall see.

[edit]
It can be fixed using overflow:scroll/auto which gives a horizontal scrollbar or probably by using floats. The first solution is ugly and the second less stable than tables. I think I will put each post back into a table but only the one table, the inner tables stay out. Thats still a 75% reduction in the number of tables and associated tags so that will have to do. Anyway, the objective was to improve styling options, this was just a sideline.

It's coming hopefully sooner rather than later.

Not quite, you have fallen victim of the IE5 bug. Your forum is aligning left in IE5. See the post Kennel referred you to and my solution.

I mean remove it completely. I really don't want or need to know who is moderating a forum. If this is a feature some people must have then you could always put "Moderated by xxxx" under the name of the forum. If there is a moderator this will increase the height of the row, if no moderator, no increase in height and no wasted space. It also has the knock on effect of making the topic description wider so less wrapping with long descriptions.

To remove the mods column just open index.php in a text editor with line numbers and remove line 121 (I am assuming v.1.1 of PunBB). The line to be removed reads

<td class="puncent"><?php echo $moderators ?></td>

You can alter the width of the authors column by editing viewforum.php. It is at line 110 and reads

<td class="punhead" style="width: 14%; white-space: nowrap"><?php echo $lang_common['Author'] ?></td>

Just alter the width percentage. This will however result in the topics column becoming wider or narrower as the case may be to compensate.

If you get stuck post back and I will email you altered copies of the two files.

Actually there is a far simpler way to make major changes to the look of PunBB and to make it skinnable without major code changes. I am working on it right now. All you need do is to parse a few more of the boards elements to main.tpl and put some of the html from the php files to into main.tpl. In short, make main.tpl more fully reflect the structure of the board. The idea to be able to shuffle all the boards major elements around, set styles for a lot more individual elements and distribute quite advanced skins which consist simply of modified versions of main.tpl and a stylesheet. In other words, many of the advantages of a full templated skinning system without the performance overhead. You even end up with less code since a lot of the duplicated html from the various .php files is put in main.tpl only once. Of course you end up with a main.tpl which is about twice the size of the existing one but I don't see that is going to make any appreciable difference to performance and the output pages are exactly as they are now. I have barely started this but the following should give some indication of what I mean though now I look at it, all those tables except for pun_main could easily be replaced with CSS.

<pun_announcespacer>

<pun_announcement>

<table class="punspacer" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="4">
    <tr>
        <td>
            <pun_crumbs>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

<table class="punspacer" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="4">
    <tr>
        <td>
            <pun_pages>
        </td>
        <td>
            <pun_postlinks>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

<pun_main>

<table class="punspacer" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="4">
    <tr>
        <td>
            <pun_pages>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

BTW. There is actually a BBS system called ProxyBB which is tableless and which is XHTML 1.1 strict compliant. I got the details from Forum Insider. A link to the board is below but I warn you, it breaks in IE5. Strangely enough, it breaks IE5 in pretty much the same way as Spots re-coded PunBB does.
http://forums.proxywiregen.com/

Now for the minor rant. Even if friend Spot succeeds I still don't think its a good idea. I think a BBS system using CSS rather than tables is a great idea in its own right but simply using CSS to mimic an existing table based layout seems to be silly. A bit like installing Linux just to run a windows emulator. Much better to design a CSS based BBS from the ground up with a whole new approach to BBS design. You are also much less likely to encounter cross browser problems that way since they could be eliminated in the design itself rather than having to be coped with by hacks as an afterthought. A more practical approach for PunBb could be a hybrid solution. Remove tables for those elements that don't need them such as the header, spacers and probably the footers. Reduce the nesting of tables for the forum itself particularly where there only funciton is to create a border but keep the main output from the database in tabled.