Tableless forum themes

[ryanhellyer]

I've been messing around lately trying to create a fully tableless forum design. There seem to be none available for SMF and I can see no reason why.

Have any of you ever attempted this before for an SMF forum? Or any other forum software?

There are some attempts at tableless designs in the SMF themes directory, but it is obvious from looking at them that they are an attempt to create a tableless design, but have come up short on quality as all the ones I've seen so far look like the designers have had trouble converting the table based layouts to an equivilent tableless design.

The new phpBB3 default Pro Silver theme uses a tableless design and I plan to use this as a model for my own SMF theme. A VERY crude pre-alpha version of my theme is available here ... http://ryanhellyer.net/nosebleedsmf/. It is a conversion of the old NoseBleed theme from phpBB2.

[BigAlReturns]

Just to let you know Ryan I get a 404 on your link.
I've never personally tried doing a tableless forum theme, but there's no reason whatsoever it couldn't be done reasonably easily. In fact, I'd say the nature of a forum, i.e. posts "on top" of each other, flowing down the page, particularly lends itself to CSS layout. Problems with CSS layout are much more common when getting sections next to each other horizontally than vertically in my experience.
My plan of attack for doing this would just be to create a single page with a few posts on that works, then integrate the forums templating into this. I'm no graphic designer so it won't look pretty, but I might have a quick go at this later and let you know how I go on.

[ryanhellyer]

Woops, wrong link!

Here's the correct one: http://ryanhellyer.net/nosebleedsmf/

And yep, I've already prepared the basic pages, it's just a giant hassle incorporating it into the SMF template system unfortunately

Does anyone know if SMF is more complicated than other forum softwares? eg: phpBB3, VBulletin etc.?

PS: The HTML in my mockup above is quite crude at the moment, the semantics is messed up and I plan to modify it to match the phpBB3 default Pro Silver type system.

[ryanhellyer]

I've done some searching and here is an example of a fairly semantical theme:
http://turkish.doom9.org/smftheme/index.php?theme=15

It uses a single table to display the board index. However the board index could be considered a table anyway so that's not really unsemantical.

I found it on a site owned by an SMF themer called Eren who has made some other semantical themes as well. I haven't a direct download link for the theme above though But I've let a post on their blog asking where to find it, so hopefully they'll get back to me so I can try it out.