I'm going to defend Jason a bit here. But first, I think he's referring to these specific templates and not the fact that it's a template based system, and that might be causing some confusion. And let me also say that so far I'm pretty happy with this forum so far (I'm looking to convert a site from w3t to gf).

Switching colors to integrate into your site isn't the easiest task it should be. I love the concept of templates and I think the basic layout of these is fine. But I don't like these colors at all (and I'm not overly thrilled with all the icons) and one of the problems with integrating into a different color scheme has to do with some of the graphics, which are clearly designed for this color scheme. Personally I would have gone with graphics that are more color generic and will fit with a variety of color schemes, even if you limited it to light color backgrounds.

But the biggest issue I see is that stylesheets are being used, but sort of as an afterthought. There are alot of things hard coded into the templates that really should be in the stylesheet. All the stuff in the globals and language that relate to design elements (fonts, bgcolor, etc... ) should be in the stylesheet and none of that should be in the template, which should really just be for dealing with the layout. The concept of the templates here goes pretty much against that. With all that design info in a stylesheet you would have the ability to do a 5 minute quickie change. Edit one file to change colors and fonts, boom, you are done. And you could even add a feature to the user options, that let's them choose from different style sheets that could be created by this community, pretty easily I might add. Hey there's a feature that's missing Then you could have template sets and stylesheets within template set for your googles of choices.

Now, I'm coming from the w3t community which was more established so that's part of my bias/opinion and I recognize it's a new product and will evolve as this community wants it to because GT is great about getting involved with this community.

What would be great, and I've asked this before, is if there were the default set and then a default_css set, which had everything converted.

Here, just for fun, I'm attaching a screen shot of what I'm doing with mine... you probably won't even recognize it. note the navigation at the top, the message listings, etc... I've ripped out a bunch of stuff and will be adding others so my focus isn't (I'll apologize for this now) to make a default set others can use or to convert it fully to stylesheets, but rather one that I can use right away for this new site I'm working on. Sorry.

As for features, I really haven't had a chance to look at comparing this to w3t or ubb or vbulletin, but that's actually on my to do list here once I finish with redesigning all my templates, at least against the features I'm using in the forums now that I want to switch... If someone has a checklist already out there, post it up, let's see how they stack up... I'm guessing it's pretty close. Also remember that a lot of the features in these other products came from their communities. I know of at least two in w3t that are my ideas and there are probably more. Once I get a chance to go through the code, I'll be happy to post up what I think is missing just to get on par with what I'm using now on another site. I can tell you right off the top that polls are very important to me and so is an email this post to a friend.

Take all this for what it's worth. It's not intended as a criticism to GT but more of an observation based upon where I'm coming from . HTH.