tracer_Z phpBB skin - currently in Beta

[symbolicpixel]

There is no telling how many folks will be interested in whatever templates I can put together for phpBB, but it's worth a try. Even though my latest skin project, tracer_Z, is running on my site at the moment, it does not mean it is fully complete yet. I still have the group control panel and private message layouts that still needs to be taken care of. The rest, I have placed in my best interest. =) Gimme some feedback! Works great with Firefox; I hate IE!

http://symbolicpixel.x10hosting.com/phpBB2

$/X

 

[omychron]

smooooth.
Only point of complaint so far: the grey letters against the grey background are a little hard on the eyes sometimes.
Maybe make a bit of a stronger contrast?
This could be my screen though, and it's only a minor thing. Keep this up, and get it finished!

 

[symbolicpixel]

Thanx so far. =)

My skin project has consisted of div layers: One for the login strip at the top (header), one for the header, and one for the body and footer. Internet Explorer lays these out differently by slamming all my layers to the left and that ticks me off! This is why I said earlier "works great in Firefox". One reason the templates between two different browsers are laid out differently is simply because of the rendering engines that browsers carry (like Gecko in Firefox and maybe even OS X Safari).

 

[Derek]

I LOVE that template can you tell me how you made it.

 

[symbolicpixel]

All I can tell ya is that for most GFX-based work, like images, buttons, backgrounds, and any odds-and-ends, I use Photoshop CS 3 all around. The other part of the work is understanding skills in HTML/XHTML/CSS, combined with whatever parse codes found within a certain message board program like phpBB and even vBulletin here. Another part is that I am in the underground, so I take pieces of any good GFX art I might find and re-do it to make up nice headers, buttons, and so on. Finally, I learn from the works of other template developers, which I believe can be in most cases important for starters.

Developing any type of skin template does take brains of advanced web design, GFX, the best code to present such content, and a lot of time on the computer. Re-coding most message board template pieces (that assembles the web page as a whole, it's what I call it) to ensure the best results of the skin template as a whole also takes time. It's because the message board itself can have a lot of features; it's important to cover as much as possible.

I LOVE that template can you tell me how you made it.

$/X
Edit:



Update: browser compatibility issues fixed. I still hate Internet Explorer, but I used the Javascript to pass out different div-layer properties. Example for div-layer behavior in the header:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (navigator.appName.toUpperCase().match(/MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER/) != null) {
    document.write('<div style="position:relative; top: 0; z-index: 2;" width="100%" align="center" height="185">');
} else {
    document.write('<div style="position:relative; top: -16; z-index: 2;" width="100%" align="center" height="185">');
}
// -->
</script>

$/X