Hi
So with 1.8 if I want to upgrade my 1.6 forum and have a modified customized theme how do I go about upgrading the theme?
Is the theme compatible just by upgrading to 1.8 or is some work needed on the theme.
Some people have been saying that it's easier to recreate your theme from scratch than trying to directly import it into 1.8
I imported one of my custom themes into the beta and it worked great. Then I tried a different one and it was unusable. So you can just try it and see if you like it. Thing is, though, it will not take advantage of new theme-driven features (such as the new buttons).
My plan is to recreate my theme based on the 1.8 layout, but making it have the same general look as what I have now. OTOH, my theme is not very custom. Just CSS and two template mods.
I've imported my theme successfully. The thing is, there are many new templates and many modified ones. So in the end you may lose most of your theme to the default one.
Is the format of the previous version of the plugins and themes work on this version?
It depends on the plugins and the themes.
The plugins will be a lot more similar than the themes. The MyBB team has added a lot of new features that will be useful for plugin development in 1.8, but they haven't really done much to break compatibility with existing plugins. Some of the template modifications needed for plugins may need to be updated for 1.8, but besides that, it's only really making use of new features for 1.8 and changing the compatibility marker in the plugin.
I had attempted to import a couple of themes back with the beta 2 release. They import, but MyBB has changed so much since the 1.6 release that for advanced themes, it's probably best just to redo them. The MyBB community is essentially starting fresh as far as themes are concerned, but the new default theme gives a much better base to start from. That's for sure.
Anyway, as far as your custom theme, you're probably best off just doing a for-scratch port of it. As for plugins, it looks like popular plugins are going to either be ported, or have replacements coded for them pretty quickly.