Lack of vB Skin Archive Site

[Khuffie]

Hey... i'm new to vB, and I spent most of today trying to hunt down some good sites that have say, a collection of (free) vB skins, and to my surprise I found none. Sure, there's individual sites with individual skins that they created, but no all-encompassing archive that lists a lot of skins that others have submitted in an organized manner...

I've looked at places like vBulletinTemplates, and it doesn't quite do that properly, neither does

Why is that? It's strange, because there were quite a few for IPB (i just switched).

Would anyone be interested in working on it? I'm all up for spearheading a new vB Skinning Community site...I already have a server we can use until the thing (hopefully) takes off...

Hope this isnt considered advertising, but if anyone's interested, please reply and discuss here...and hey, if i'm missing a site or something, please smack me in the face and post a link to it

[Zachery]

They have been tried and done before (many a time) The problem is that why put 20-30 hours (240-360USD one time sale if not more, or 500+ usd for resold packages) worth of time when you can make it by selling the styles?

The IPB community is/was madeup for alot of users who were not paying for support, they were making more free styles, and the same i think its true with phpBB. I am attempting to close this gap by making and releasing more styles here, however i personaly lack the graphics design ablilitys that most desingers have, i can code just about anything into vBulletin, but i cannot design it I am trying my best there are a few default styles, with color only modifications, down in the vBulletin 3 downloads area, next week there will be vBulletin XP Blue & Silver released.

[Khuffie]

They have been tried and done before (many a time) The problem is that why put 20-30 hours (240-360USD one time sale if not more, or 500+ usd for resold packages) worth of time when you can make it by selling the styles?

Either the phrasing confused me, or I've got no idea what you're talking about...what do you mean $240-$360 one time sale?

I've seen quite a few free styles for vB out there today, some quite good. Most of them were posted on random vB hacking/mod forums...it wouldn't hurt to have a place where they can all be under one roof, per se . Might need to hunt down the skinners and ask them to post individually, but it can't hurt to try.

Do you know what exactly has been tried before in terms of sites? Maybe we can learn from their mistakes? Another interesting idea is to have two sections, one that archives 'free' skins, and another that is a directory for all the sites that have skins they made for sale. That way, not only would it be valuable for those poor folk out there, but also for anyone whose looking to buy a skin too...

And heck, I'm a designer. I do know a bit of PHP/MySQL/CSS, but I don't have the time to invest in a board's skinning system just yet (damn university taking up most of my free time ). Maybe I could design a skin and we can work together on getting it to work in vB?

[Zachery]

Sorry about that, skins like yaxay, one time sale, styles that vbstyles.com sells, for mass distribution, Money is a motovator

[ChrisLM2001]

Would be nice that programmers and artists teamed up and did some skins. The skin offerings are really lacking (more mods are available than skins...even paid designs, for example).

I'm an old school artist --of the paste up and pica rulers age-- and seriously pine for the day vB will have a site that's for web designers and one they'll frequent daily (like the cgtalk.com site). Too many times I goto vbulletintemplates.com and it looks like a ghost site.

Chris

[Khuffie]

Well Chris, there's nothing stopping us from making one

What else would you like to see in a vB site aimed at webdesigners? Post away!

My ideas so far, and I haven't had a chance to think about it much:

- an archive of available free skins for vB 3 and up
- a directory of sites that offer vB skins for money

It's still basic, but there's plenty of room for improvement. The site could provide tutorials for skinning, button sets, and so on. Any ideas are welcome!

[ChrisLM2001]

Skinning tutorials would be wonderful! Even better would be customizations like how to add image borders.

Designing for vB is much different than a standard webpage, as each template page is but a part of the whole design. One error in one page can screw up the overall layout. Folks complain about the cost of the skins, but only if they knew how much time it takes to make the design changes globally, they might appreciate why it's expensive. Going through 22 template pages isn't a walk in the park!

Really need tuts in CSS. How to make the templates browser friendly, too. Took me days to figure out how to style the buttons in vB so even Opera can see something prettier (trying to make a forum that uses less images, yet still offer some style). Had to hunt all over the internet for the right code, and then try to get it to be friendly in 3 of the main browsers.

We sure need a skinning site.

Chris

[Razgo]

We sure need a skinning site

i couldn't agree more. zachery is the only one i have seen pushing out free skins and all in the one place too

[MGM]

It sounds like a really interesting idea... if no one is willing to do it, I could try to design and code about 20-30 styles and create the site myself, but I'd need help from a PHP coder to help me code a system for sharing the styles

I've been thinking about doing a design/computers site, but I think this would help out more people than a random computer site

MGM out

[Khuffie]

MGMaster; I've seen quite a few free vB skins out there, I could try contacting the skinners and see if they'd be interested in submitting their skins to this sort of archive...of course they'd have the ability to post descriptions, URLs to their sites and so forth.

As for the site itself, I could start looking into solutions about how it will be organzied and structured...my best guess right now would be to use vB and some sort of add-on to it...but we WOULD need a cool, special skin for it

It seems that people are interested! This project is a go! We need a cool name for the site so I can buy the domain and start working on it...any suggestions?!

[ManagerJosh]

Out of curosity, but what about www.vbulletintemplates.com ?

[Khuffie]

I've seen that, but it lacks organization...it doesn't really archive anything in any sort of method, it just allows people to upload things to a forum, plus, it seems to be dead No updates since July.

[DarknessDivine]

I'd help with what I can.....I can make some graphics..just have a tad trouble with the code department...

[Zachery]

I can code just about anything handed to me (Within reason) but i alas cannot design

[Acid Burn]

If you got it running i'd make an attempt at releasing some skins for you to use at it, but wouldn't be at the top of my priorty list or anything, schools taken that spot for the next few years anyway