Thanks to everyone for the feedback so far. It seems the main them here is there really isn't going to be one format that is going to please everyone and the main factor behind alot of the decisions that go on here is you guys are the customers and the customer is always right[]/w3timages/icons/wink.gif[/]. So that means we need more flexibility so everyone can be happy.
Templates is something I've wanted to do for quite a while. I made a very serious attempt at doing templates for the PERL version a while back that didn't go very smoothly. The main reason for this is PERL is coded with use strict to run under mod_perl so the variables don't carry over from script to script which makes templates very tough to do properly, but I have a few new ideas for this. The PHP version would be much easier to apply templates to though. The main thing with templates in a total dynamic site is they have to be done properly or the whole thing becomes slow because there is so much reading and parsing being done for each script.
So, again here is my proposal. The only thing that really started this was the fact that I asked if post headers on top were worth it and the new post icon things. Before that, everyone seemed fairly ok with the 2 different layouts. So, why don't I just finish the next version up, get it ported over to php and then take a look at templates.
Like Sharif said, I could start with a small template system on just some of the scripts like showflat and showthreaded instead of trying to delve into a complete template based system. This would allow for a testing period to see how it works, how people like the templates and what changes can be made to make them better before trying to do more of the scripts.
Thoughts?
