Layout control over blogs.

[Tricky]

Just a thought.

These layouts are pretty bland. Places like LiveJournal give the user a lot of control over layout. From adjusting CSS to color usuage and uploading images (to the layout), pretty much everything can be done without even having to switch over to a paid account.

vBulletin limits most of that, I know. But I know it can do more. Do you intend to hold the same level of control over the blogs are you do over the forums? If this is indeed more of an open thing, allowing users to personalize their blogs wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Me, I'd be happy with slightly greater control over how my text looks. Like paragraphs for example, when I write articles I usually want them to look right. Two book-style  's (  = an HTML Entity, a forced space) at the beginning of each paragraph, so I don't necesarily have to double-break after each paragraph.

Writings need to be attractive as well as informative. For forums, simplistic style is fine. Blogging is different though, you're kinda.. putting someone in a chair, asking him or her to write something decent. I see layout control as bit of respect to that.

No pressure, this is just how I happen to feel about it.

[BuckGB]

Originally Posted by Tricky

These layouts are pretty bland. Places like LiveJournal give the user a lot of control over layout. From adjusting CSS to color usuage and uploading images (to the layout), pretty much everything can be done without even having to switch over to a paid account.

vBulletin limits most of that, I know. But I know it can do more. Do you intend to hold the same level of control over the blogs are you do over the forums? If this is indeed more of an open thing, allowing users to personalize their blogs wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Me, I'd be happy with slightly greater control over how my text looks. Like paragraphs for example, when I write articles I usually want them to look right. Two book-style  's (  = an HTML Entity, a forced space) at the beginning of each paragraph, so I don't necesarily have to double-break after each paragraph.

Writings need to be attractive as well as informative. For forums, simplistic style is fine. Blogging is different though, you're kinda.. putting someone in a chair, asking him or her to write something decent. I see layout control as bit of respect to that.

I'd be more than happy to let users customize their blog layout and style, but there's no way of enabling such a feature in the blog system at the moment. Of all the blog features people are requesting on vbulletin.com, user customization is by far the most common. This is only the first release version of the blog system, so I would hope that the vB team will introduce more options in the coming months.

The only other choice I have is to create a completely new style for the forums and then assign it to the blog system. However, there are many good reasons why I don't do that. These forums have a lot of customizations and it would be a huge undertaking to keep multiple styles working the same way after every tweak or upgrade. It wouldn't help people that wanted their own customizations, anyway, as the new style would still have to be created by me.

[Tricky]

I suspected as much. Yeah, I too would definitely wait until a future release.

I've always liked Jelsoft. Am I exaggerating if I say that they made forums what they are today? I always had the impression that other sites were using vBulletin concepts for their own forum software, Forumplanet being a major one. Heh, do I know some interesting stories about that.

Anyways, I've kept an eye on them ever since some of their first forum code came out. I was part of a gaming forum back then, around 1999/2000, where they tested a lot of early stuff. They're good, always have been. I'm sure they'll get the blogging part straightened out.

I'm curious though. The whole index page portal thing, did you create that?

[BuckGB]

I created the additional category tier and then used a third-party addon to break the sub-forum links into two separate columns within a more confined area. So, no, I really can't take all the credit.

[Tricky]

Ah, I understand. I was asking because it reminded me a bit of OsCommerce. I worked with that during an internship, when I was still an Information Engineering student. That was fairly modular stuff, very powerful. Add a category box, remove a checkout box, etc. But you'd get these shop layouts that were very.. similar, no matter how much you tweaked and personalized them for a single store. Our job was to make their highly unapproachable product database connect to it. What a nightmare that was.