[oldengine]

Looking back in on this site, which in my opinion has the best looking styles for my site's theme and these will be on my shopping list when I do upgrade.

Right now, my vBulletin is hacked up so much that upgrading vB itself is a major nightmare, let alone messing with the templates.

In the styles here, is there an easier method of customizing the headers and the footer? My navbar is currently carrying my Openads ad banners. I should probably move these to the headers.

I say header(s) because each of my over two dozen boards has a different header logo or carries different ads. I've grown it into a monster over the years.

PS: I notice that vBulletin in line 1 is lit up as though it is a link, but it doesn't work. That would be an EXCELLENT idea to add affiliate links from keywords like eBay or AbeBooks throughout my site!

Do you really think that the SEO urls are doing anything for you beyond having a site map and an H1 in the heading?

[Kall]

Hi,

Firstly, thanks for pointing out the issue with the vBulletin link. I have fixed it.

The customisations in the headers of most of the vBE Styles are minimal. Only the sidebar style has a lot of customisation, but you should still be able to place your ads.

(The linked text is created by GAL - The vB Geek ... he makes several excellent commercial modifications for vB).

Regarding the SEOed URLs, they are not the only benefit of vBSEO - among the multiple other benefits is the Link Consolidation. Basically, stock vB has multiple URLs for a single resource - showthread with t= and p= variables pointing at the same thing etc. vBSEO
makes all of these links into one URL, so PageRank is preserved.

Of course, I work for Crawlability, so my views are to be expected to be skewed in favour of it.

[oldengine]

Thanks for the replies.

Regarding VBSEO, I bought the package but I have never implemented it due to various concerns. One of which is their stubbornness regarding brand free. The other is that I have hundreds, maybe thousands of cross links between posts. Do the original links still work?

Anyway, I'm back here studying your style wares.

Edit: Went to VBSEO and downloaded the latest files and i see that they now have a brand free option. I have no excuses now.

[Kall]

Haha, I was about to come back here and tell you that.

Plus, your old links are all 301-redirected to the new ones, so all connectivity/PageRank is maintained.

[oldengine]

Hey, since you are looking in here.

I'm going to upgrade my test forum now (different domain, password directory) and install VBSEO to check it out. While I'm at it, I will install your steel series and get acquainted with it as well.

Can the steel (all colors) be set up so that one of them is the parent and therefore all my hacking can be done in the parent and automatically duplicate into the others?

I've got to simplify this thing!

[Kall]

It can indeed!

Just use Steel blue as the parent, and import the others as child styles, then on each child style, 'Revert all Templates'.

This will not only make the changes you make to Steel Blue filter down to the others, it will cut the database space used by a lot, because the code for the other Steel colours will not need to be there.

[oldengine]

In process of installing and testing right now.

I did download 3.6.6 by mistake at first, not realizing that you have a steelblue 3.6.8b.

* Are the images any different between .6 and .8 or just the xml(s)?

* I imported steelblue3.6.8.xml per your instructions, but what about product-vBEstyle.xml - are there instructions for that?
I guess you mean product-steelstyle.xml in the instructions? What does this do and do?

* What about your other 3.6.6 color styles - can they be used on the current vB 3.6.8 ?

(I took care of some PP financials and placed an order.)

[Kall]

Hmm, I can't think of any new images in 3.6.8.

Ahh, I probably used the new template for the instructions but didnt update the file name, yes, that's the Product. It enables the customised greeting in the navbar, the stars in the postbit, and the copyright in the footer.

The other colour styles can indeed be. Just do as I suggested in the previous post and revert the templates to save space, all you really need are the images and the css.. the templates are identical.

and, thank you for your purchase. If you run into any issues, please tell me.

[oldengine]

Excellent!

Now it's on to the VBSEO test.

[oldengine]

I don't know where to post this, so we'll give it a go here...

I'm using vB version 3.6.2 (all patched and hacked) and before I update that to vB 3.6.8 I'm wondering whether the Steel 3.6.6 or 3.6.8 styles will work OK on version 3.6.2 of vBulletin?

What does Steelblue 3.6.8B (fixed) mean - is that fixed format or fixed bugs?

Also, note that the earlier versions 3.6.1 3.6.2 3.6.6 of Steel Gold have incorrect file names (no suffix) on the vBEnhanced download files.

Found this: - We need a table chart of vB version vs. vBEnhanced Style version.
(Note: the template changes in 3.6.3 - 3.6.4 do not require an update of your vBE style. All 3.6.2 styles will work on 3.6.4, just remember to 'Ignore version' when uploading. )

For now, I'll use the Steel Red 3.6.2 to experiment with on my main site and wait on installing the rest of the Steel series until I upgrade my main vB site to 3.6.8.

(Threads: 38,730, Posts: 240,502, Members: 11,509) - upgrading is scary!

Found this on vbulletin.org - Style Name: Steel Blue for vB 3.6.1/2/3/4/5/6/7
Style Version: 3.6.7 - looks like I'm all set!

[Kall]

Regarding the names, that's an odd bug that I can't seem to resolve.. the software I use for the download system is in a bit of a Beta state. Doesn't seem to always happen... but sometimes happens every time.

If you have any problems with the 3.6.2 version, please let me know.. it's been a while, but I still have the files on my PC.