James B.

A very small qualm... the one place I always want to go after completing an upgrade is to the Admin CP. As it happens, that is the one place there isn't a link to. You can click to the main index, or to documentation, or to the IPS website... but not your own ACP.

It irks me.

its kinda annoying to see so many requests that says "similar to XenForo".. i do not think this is how you do things...
I mean IPB is better then XenForo in so many things .. i do not see topics in XF forum asking to mimic IP.Board .. every one has their own way of doing things or else there wont be variety of products / soft wares to pick from .. will all be the same !

Just thought I would put this message on for 2 reasons. One as I would like to tell Invision "You are doing it right!!!", and secondly to show this to any potential VBulletin convert as I think its important.

I have been a user of vbulletin on and off since early version 2 and have seen many upgrades of a large size done to the vbulletin software under jelsoft. Jelsoft IMO was the company to beat and if they had carried on as they did in the version 2 days I think you would have struggled to compete with them, I will say that honestly. Now in my opinion there are 2 things that have changed. One is the management of their software being taken over by internet brands, and the second being the seemly inability to keep up with the times and add what every user needs to their community software.

Now I think the second item there you clearly win hands down as this software suite simply has most of what your ever going to need. People can mention that vbulletin has more hacks/mods etc that any other software and that is true, however from what I have experienced over the past few month this it not down to the dedication of free addon providers, but more down to the lack of need. Of course there are going to be some, however I have around half the quantity of modifications on my current site as I did on vbulletin and 0 loss of usability with the added benefit of 100% support from invision on the majority of it as they are official products.

This one however is the big one for me. I have been reading every blog, every topic posted on the progress of 3.1 and one things stands out above all else, and thats the fact that you guys listen. You have an excellent team of developers that are active in the community they work for (and remember guys, this is a job for them not a hobby). Charles I think has a massive affect on the structured organisation of this and I think is a big asset to invision, and I do hope that his managers are reading this topic also.

So if you guys wanna know why your winning, the answer is simple. You listen to us and act upon in accordingly. NOTHING AT ALL is more important to any of us, whether it be a hobby like myself or a business than you listening. NOTHING!!!

THANKYOU IPS

I see this as being a great tool for skinners, at least in the aspect of starting off with the colors they want to implement before they start making the actual changes they have in mind.

Here are few things that I think could make it a very powerful tool.

• Include a few blank images (such as the logo) so that it can be better customized. I know a PSD would most likely be impractical at best, so just having some images that someone could use to import into PhotoShop with using the default gdk from the client area would be a good workaround.
  
• Have the links clickable in the preview.  I can understand it'd be a huge thing to accomplish but thought I'd toss it out there.  Being able to click on Blog/Gallery/etc to view the results would be wonderful.
  
• An html file that documents the color changes made (default values followed by the new values) would also be nice also.  I would imagine it would be a really small file, since it wouldn't be necessary to include where the values were changed, only the the old -vs- new values (example: "1D3652 changed to 52361D") A demo of the board index would probably do the job, so if the resulting colors aren't quite what the person wanted, they know what to search for to change it. Would work with some of the images exported as mentioned above.

The last item would be very helpful to the average user as sometimes, the intended changes don't pan out correctly, or may not be quite what the person wanted, and helps them to know what to search/replace. Like this for example, there are light brown areas that don't work out quite right.  Knowing those color values would make it easier for me to tweak it after installing it.


Something else that could be powerfully helpful for a skinner, and I imagine would need to be done by a 3rd party, is a tool that could compare changes made to a custom skin from the default, then apply those changes to an updated skin or at least document the changes in a triple view comparison.  Prior version default, current version default and customized skin.  Could be a good tool to help a skinner apply similar changes to new colors (from the skin generator) and updated skin code (changes between versions).  Basically, similar to the built in skin differences report, but on steroids, as well as something that could attempt to automatically upgrade a skinners work for them.