Your old template will require several changes — I might even recommend starting with the default template and editing from there. There are a handful of new required tags, and some tags have changed meaning (the "learn more" link above is out-of-date, but I'll post a new tag list tomorrow night). You'll also need to be careful with the new comment form code.

It will require a bit of work, but it shouldn't be too difficult. Your old categories, comments, and captions should remain through the upgrade with no problem.

I'm in day two of my upgrade. Still, most of my templates are broken. Ugh.

Zach,

Looking forward to that new old car smell

:-)

Zach, sorry for the headache. Let me know if you have any specific questions or issues.

I was going to send this via email, but I figured this might be helpful to others as well. All is intended to be constructive. :)

General Upgrade Notes:
- The introduction of <#fbcss#> is nice for portability, but it is a horror for template generation/editing. WYSIWYG editors become useless when one cannot see their CSS layout in action, locally. My fix was to hardcode my static CSS link into each template file until I was done editing. Then I swapped out the link for the dynamic code.

- Not sure if this is by design, or if I have just lost touch with the XHTML standards, but I noticed that I had to go all around my templates and change relative URLs to explicit URLS. (i.e, adding leading "/" to all the IMG paths. On the main.php page, I also needed to prepend a "/" onto <#fbimage#> - Is this normal?

- As was mentioned in a different thread, most people want to make their changes in one file. I encountered a few areas which required multiple files to be edited just to accomplish simple layout changes. Example: <#fbmenu#> layout control has moved to the CSS file. This is where you can adjust spacing, padding, location, etc.. However, to adjust the row/column count, I need to also edit the settings file. While I agree with your choice of moving the layout controls into the _style.css file, I can't help but think that there must be a way to accomplish the row/column count in CSS as well. In this way, you could truly separate the data from the presentation.

Requests/Questions:

- I still can't get <#fbdate#> to spit out photo titles instead of dates. Any trick here? For clarity, it might make more sense to break this up into two variables: <#fbdate#>. <#fbphototitle#> or something

- Archives thumbs should have an option to be in reverse order, so that the newest is at the top of the first page and the oldest is at the bottom of the last page. Is there an easy, built-in way to accomplish this? Perhaps add in a $reverse_archives variable to compliment the $reverse variable?

- The Comment notification email should be easier to modify. I know that I'd prefer to have the notification at least contain the email address of the person who left the comment, to allow for easy response. Perhaps the notification could actually come from the poster's email address? In any case, I'm suggesting adding a few new variables to the fb_settings file. They would be something like:

$email_comments_from
// reply-to address for comment notifications. 0 = $email_comments_to address. 1 = poster's email address from <#fbemailval#>, if available.

$email_comments_text
// body of message sent when a comment is left. Allows use of <#fb*#> variables. (e.g., <#fbcomval#>, etc..)

- Last, a "nice-to-have" feature would be a "is-required" value for email on the comment form. This would work in concert with the previous suggestion.

All in all, it's a good step forward with FB3. Nice work Donald.

-Zach

so what we all learn on WYSIWYG-Editors... throw em away and get to the source! PSPad, TextPad, Phase5 are only a few that make coding faster... (btw: do you have XAMPP - a local server - running on your PC in order to see realtime-changes of your documents?)