Why I like designing in Vanilla

So, I recently created a theme for Vanilla, and I have to say, it was fun. It was so simple to design the theme and save changes as I made them with Chrome, and I love it.

Vanilla may lack a built-in editor like IP.Board and MyBB have, but it stores its stylesheets and templates in files instead of the database - making it a lot easier to develop themes for it on a localhost installation. I can edit the theme using Chrome’s built-in developer tools, and then save the CSS files directly to the folder the theme is kept in. Compared to copying each and every change out of the developer tool window and pasting them in the editor on IPB and MyBB, this is a great change.

Though copying the entire CSS file out of the developer tool and pasting it in the editor would have worked for MyBB, with IPB it seems that everything is minified coming out of the database, despite changing the setting that’s supposed to control that. So, rather than lose readability of the CSS file, I’m forced to copy every little change into the editor as I implement them.

So, developing in Vanilla is awesome, MyBB is ok, and IPB is a bit of a pain unless I find some sort of WebDav client.