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Now that I'm getting to the point where I'm setting things up, I (of course) quickly realize that VaultWiki's defaults heavily clash with my forum. On looking through the style info, though, I discovered no easily changeable values to alter the colors and whatnot.
Is this something I can do, or will I have to be adding entries to additional.css to achieve this? And if so, what entries would be necessary to add in? (I'm especially looking for content background and text color.)
I would recommend overriding the CSS values you need using additional.css. In the vw.css template, we have also noted likely candidate names for style variables when we add them in Alpha 2, so that you can make a note of this if you need to style before that time.
Working on getting the CSS updated today with the style variables so you don't have such a nightmare in the future.
Obviously, I see those are in now.
Any way I can quickly have them pick up variables from my pre-existing skins and templates? Right now they're pure defaults, and it's complaining about a total lack of phrases as well in the "Variables" section.
Compare the new version of the template with the previous version of the template in AdminCP > Styles & Templates > Find Updated Templates. Using an empty Notepad file or something, write down what stylevars to use for each of the changes you made.
Note that the "Variables" section will probably not save any changes unless you make the modifications discussed here: https://www.vaultwiki.org/issues/3022/
Also, since you have to make changes to many StyleVars anyway, you should probably use vBulletin's own StyleVar editor, since that will let you open more than one in the same window.
Is there a reason vw doesn't just use vBulletins default stylvars?
vBulletin's default stylevars are named for certain things like "forumbit border". Since VaultWiki 4 doesn't use these specific elements it becomes an issue of semantics, and would actually make it more difficult for users to figure out what stylevars to edit if non-semantic stylevars were used.
In the past (VaultWiki 3), we did use vBulletin's existing stylevars for certain things since VaultWiki was at the time just a forum thread with added functionality. But we ran into problems whenever vBulletin decided to modify their stylevars, change the names, or remove them entirely. If you were unaware, this happened way too often during the life of vBulletin 4. We don't want to tell users that they have to upgrade from 4.0.5 to 4.1.12 in order to continue using VaultWiki because the latest VaultWiki had to switch to different stylevars that didn't necessarily exist before.
Giving VaultWiki its own stylevars means you can modify the wiki style without affecting anything in the rest of the forum, and modify the forum without affecting the wiki. This is how vBulletin has handled its own add-ons such as the blog and CMS in vBulletin 4. It also means the user can find the stylevars more easily when they want to change things in the wiki, since they are grouped for VaultWiki, and they are labelled for how they are used in VaultWiki.
I understand. I have been away from forum development for a few years. I missed all the fun with vb4. It would be nice if you published a list of what does what. Some style vars are found in vw.css and then those have variables for the stylevar editor. Kind of confusing going back and forth looking for what's what.