As useful as having a post title that thoroughly explains the purpose of the article is, it does tend to make these first few lines a bit tricky to write without repeating yourself, so I’ll explain some background behind the question in the title first. I’ve been wanting to “sex up” the forum for a while now as I feel the Nosebleed and Conundrum variants are getting a bit tired. As great as they are (and massive thanks to CiC and Will Hough for porting them to phpBB3), I want a sexy new style.
Now, the thing is, I’d rather not go with a fixed width style – the style we’re using on the forum now (Conundrum) is a fixed width, and the bare, empty sections on both sides of the screen are starting to annoy me slightly – especially since we got this new monitor which displays at a resolution of 1366×768. The gaps at the sides are more pronounced than ever. There is another annoyance I have though, as when I switched over to subsilver to check how a fluid style would look, I was dismayed at how stretched the forum index was. The folder names and descriptions all holding tight to the left hand side of the screen, with the details like amount of topics and posts and the sections detailing the last post all squeezed over to the right.
Then it hit me. The solution. A forum index that doesn’t organise the folders in one column, wasting all that screen, but a forum index that organises the folders into two columns. Recent research into screen resolution sizes indicate that most users have a resolution larger than 1024×768, so it’s not a case of most users not being able to squeeze the two columns in.
My question is this: Why are there no two column styles?
