Today I am in the process in launching a new forum about Mauritius.
It is mostly discussion on events that are happening within Mauritius
and a hangout for Mauritians around the world. Atm we are focusing on
Mauritians in Britain and once we do get a number of visitors and
poster we will start getting other countries involved.

I have started with typical general forums so that I can expand out later into small categories.

Later on when i get time I will implement a gallery into the board.

I recently aquired a vbulletin license
& didn’t really know much about it, so for a few hours i decided to
disect the template system and if i had time to disect the page system.

Template system:

first of all the css, from the hours spent on it i couldn’t find a
place to paste in my full css edit, but I found a really neat
user-interface to help me edit the css. The one thing that i liked
about VB’s css is that there is only a few css tags that are used
globally, I really loved it, the designing of a new style is really
easy. The one thing that I disliked was the template pages, it was a
bit messy and took me a while to understand, plus it would be good if
it had a description of each template bit and where it can be found.
Overall compared to ipb ill give it a 6/10

Page system

This is by far the easiest thing I have ever worked with. I
was able to make a page within minutes, there are still functions that
i need to get used to, like permission and such, but I will get the
hang of it some time.

Overall it vb is good, but you need to sit with it for a while to see its features and usage.

Vb can be described like this:

“if you want to do 1 thing there are several options to that 1 thing,
like how it is displayed, who can do what, when it can do that, does it
need to display in a certain way?”

Alot of people use opera because of its speed, but I use it for webdesigning.

A few days ago I read that opera was the browser for web designers, so
I tried it out for a whole day and I think it was great with the cache
system it has and the build in validation tool, which I really like,
but I could have done the same on firefox. The problem on firefox is
that you don’t really seem to know where you went wrong, as the xhtml
on firefox is too passive and allows small errors whereas Opera seems
to go really strict on it and you can see where you went wrong with
html.

Overall
Opera is good for when i am designing web pages but I prefer firefox on
website browsing as the cache system on opera is quite annoying as you
could be looking at some outdated page without knowing.

From inbetween College exams and revisions I got really stressed out a bit, so I took a day off to relax.

So while relaxing I found this cool link on digg about smart, I knew
about it but never got to use it, and I aint forgiving myself for that.
SMARTY
is from my experience the best template engine I have played and
fiddled with. It auto cache part of the script that isn’t dynamic and
also full cache dynamic pages if you want it to.

The best feature is the html logic it has, it is much advanced than
ipb_kernel/template_engine.php as a standalone piece of class.

I
am going to play with it a little more to get used to its html logic,
because I like the way it saves time and server load. For any future
standalone apps that I am making I am using SMARTY.