Ok heres the thing. Recently I was asked to 'skin' a forum. This meant changing all the colours, fonts, styles and images used on said forum.
To a web designer, this in itself is fairly straight forward. The only time consuming thing foreseen in such a task could be finding the things needed to be changed in the miriad of pages used in forums.
So both a friend and myself agree to this little request and get downloading the trial version of the Invision Power Board forum. Now the version 2.x of this forum is new to us. I hadnt touched it before this point.
Upon obtaining said download, i promptly ignored the readme's and other educational files and began to upload the forums pages etc...
BIG mistake.
It appears that the newer versions of IPB are infact encrypted using the Zend Safeguard or some other rubbish. This makes all code within the files, absolute juggerish. Its crap.
This also means that you have to upload the files in Binary mode. Not the usual ASCII mode used for text files etc.
So the first attempt was fubar due to this stupid insistance on binary mode.
Second attempt successful.
Yey us.
Now on with theediting. Firstly we had to change all the colours and some the images. Easy enough we thought, yeah ..
HELL no.
The administration system of IPB, although snazzy looking and sporting some fancy features and clever bits n pieces, is FLAWED.
Oh yes click skin manager, then edit default skin, the pick the css advanced mode thingy from the snazzy popdown list.
And away we go. Full CSS attributes listed for you. Ok so we edit a few bits, click save and refresh the site to view the disgusting red test background to see if it worked.
No.
Nothing.
Well gosh darn it, some total TOOL didnt set the right properties to the folders, Oh woe is me...
So off we go on a CHMOD tour of the FTP.
Now I wouldnt have minded doing this, IF I didnt have to figure it out for myself why on earth it wasnt working.
The oh-so-healpfull snazzy administration panel said nothing about unable to write to file as ut didnt even have permissions to do so. it just went on to the default skin manager screen.
Also the hunting down of template portions was an absolute pain in the ASS.
If you are going to do a template or skin editing system, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD make it BLINDINGLY obvious what each portion is !
abbreviating some bits, elongating others, jesus christ get some brain cells and just name them properly !!!
Either that or stop being so god damn ANAL about code that anyone can write anyways !

And another thing. if you are optimising for the Zend engine and using gzip and all these wonderful optimisation techniques and technologies. WHY ARE YOU PUTTING CSS INLINE... in EACH and EVERY PAGE.
For all you are saving, you are DOUBLING the download size.. at least !
I have 2 words for you people:

Greedy Morons.

You still reading this junk ? .. Go do some REAL work.