CustomerService
01-22-2006, 02:14 PM
Anyone who has tinkered with Vbulletin templates or knows a little about vBulletin probably understands that a variable parsed in one template is not always parsed in another.
One of the most common aesthetic changes designers like to make who do their own skins is moving the information you find in the stats or in the navigation bar and throw them somewhere else - either into a new column on the left or into the header.
In the case of moving the navigation bar elements, this is easily accomplished by bringing all of your elements from the header into the navbar, which is the next template in line to be processed when a forum page is loading. This is the fastest and easiest way to put, say, a login box above the header, or put a navigation bar, complete with the now standard DHTML submenus that vBulletin uses, above your header. A good example of this practice would be in our Sophist skin, which gets rid of the navigation bar and arranges all that information in a different way below the header. All I did there was build the header in the navbar template and leave the header template empty - simple and effective.
The one thing you definitely need to keep in mind, though, is that not all pages, such as some of the redirection pages, process the navbar template, or the header for that matter. So if you have a page that does display the header and footer, but not the navbar template, you are going to end up with just the footer showing! This could look a bit awkward, even if it is seen on a rare page.:X
There are ways around this other than shrugging your shoulders if you can't bare a rare screen that flashes the footer and no navbar, which I will get into a little later...
One of the most common aesthetic changes designers like to make who do their own skins is moving the information you find in the stats or in the navigation bar and throw them somewhere else - either into a new column on the left or into the header.
In the case of moving the navigation bar elements, this is easily accomplished by bringing all of your elements from the header into the navbar, which is the next template in line to be processed when a forum page is loading. This is the fastest and easiest way to put, say, a login box above the header, or put a navigation bar, complete with the now standard DHTML submenus that vBulletin uses, above your header. A good example of this practice would be in our Sophist skin, which gets rid of the navigation bar and arranges all that information in a different way below the header. All I did there was build the header in the navbar template and leave the header template empty - simple and effective.
The one thing you definitely need to keep in mind, though, is that not all pages, such as some of the redirection pages, process the navbar template, or the header for that matter. So if you have a page that does display the header and footer, but not the navbar template, you are going to end up with just the footer showing! This could look a bit awkward, even if it is seen on a rare page.:X
There are ways around this other than shrugging your shoulders if you can't bare a rare screen that flashes the footer and no navbar, which I will get into a little later...