I don't understand quite well what you mean but if you ask for my opinion I think at least the blocks tables and the main containing table should be removed but I don't really know How all other files work and what effect that would have. Also, as Lopalong said, Mods could be troubling when changing the main design.
I think
MG is saying if you do find any tables that can be removed and replaced with DIV for example then make a new topic with the changes and he will look at it...
Yes I was intending exactly this!
When you find some code that could be rewritten in a more efficient way, feel free to suggest me the change, and I may consider to change it in Icy Phoenix.
With regards to mods.. as the template system in ICY is changing with every release I make the necessary changes to the mods... as I only use the default template when making a mod it makes no difference to me but if other templates are being used then there is that issue but I would help someone to fit it into their template either way...
Well, let me spend some words on this, since it is not the first time that this issue is raised after 1.3 release.
All the changes I did to the template system were intended to improve it and make it more flexible for designers, and I strongly believe that the goal has been reached... If we do not consider FK themes and Lopalong ones, we had only few themes released for Icy Phoenix 1.2 or lower, while after only 20 days from the release we already have some good and nice templates for 1.3 and I'm really happy with that.
The new template system is designed to provide designers with a basic framework which they could decide to use entirely or partially: this means that you can design a new template just by editing a CFG file, a couple of CSS and images without taking care of tpl files which could fit many design layout without the necessity to edit them. Not only this will also avoid designers to update their styles when original tpls are edited.
Again on the point... a new style could also be designed from scratch by creating all needed tpl files, so the designer could obtain a brand new layout, but this means of course that the style should be updated if some core vars change or will be added into the package, but that is the price to pay with ANY platform and not only with Icy Phoenix... This stands for phpBB 3, WordPress, Joomla and so on...
Having said that, I'm not planning to change the way this new system work as I'm quite happy with it and I'm testing it from over one year now on several sites.
Of course I could change some original TPLs but that doesn't mean that designers should upgrade their styles unless a new TPL var is added or modified... and that it is not happening very often (just check templates changes over SVN to have a quick idea on that).
Currently the only thing which I'm not happy with the style system is that some HTML code is still in PHP files. Every time I come to an HTML code in PHP file I'm going to remove it and add it to the template if that is possible and would not require too much complication.
Finally I would like to speak about some core CSS classes. Unfortunately there is no easy way to assign dynamic classes via TPL only (or better... there is a way but that would require many files to be recoded) and that is the reason why some core classes should still exist in any new template, such as "rowX" or "XXX-new" for example.
Just to recap all: I'm happy with the new template system, I'm not planning to change anything in the core style code, I will just fix bugs and hardcoded tags where needed, I won't add new TPL vars in this version unless strictly needed (or a new feature is added).