ElkArte Community Modern, Free, Powerful
Community building forum software

I know it is a far fetched Idea, but still how about having a theme builder for Wedge. Or support for some other software that does it. Something like changing colours of SMF themes. Or some kind of page builder as in WordPress where we can decide how a page/ over all forum theme looks like.

If you're talking about Wedge, then you're on the wrong forum... the correct one is in my website link 

(Also, it would be a "skin builder", since themes are gone from it. So I'm going to assume you really meant Elk!)

Wedge comes with skin builder ? Interesting. May be ElkArte can also able to boast of same feature. Either way, good thinking.

Please read your op again

What's the difference between a skin and a theme?

I always thought that skins are just changing basic looks where themes go into deeper changes to files other then just a couple images and css.

There are many page builder plugins for WordPress. Most of them either free or has a lite version. May be it is not difficult. Helps people without coding knowledge to customize their forum.

Almost everything is possible!
With the current code, what I see feasible is something to change colors.

The  usual difficult part for the forum-kind of scripts (against the blog-kind that wp is) are the many different types of pages.
In a blog you have basically... 2 kind of pages:
1. an archive,
2. a blog entry
Everything else is a variant of that two (search results and archives are variant of 1, pages are a variant of 2, etc.).
And even these two pages really differ only the fact that a blog entry shows 1 blog post, while the archive shows multiple blog posts, but the markup can be exactly the same.

In forums you have at least:
1. the board index,
2. the message index,
3. the topic,
4. list of messages (that is different from 3),
5. option lists (i.e. half of the profile pages and all the admin),
6. list of users.
And then you have some other less frequent kinds that we can safely ignore for now.
And all these pages show different kind of content with different needs and different markup.
Elk inherit from SMF a kind of "messy" situation, we already clean it up a bit, for example now the "post area" is exactly the same (meaning the same code) in both posts and personal messages (next step is to use the very same template for listing them as well), but there are many places where different templates are used with (almost) the same structure.

So, before being meaningful write some kind of theme builder, I think the best thing to do is finish to clean up the theme removing all duplications, all inconsistencies, etc. making easier to reuse parts of it, etc.
That's my idea (see my signature ).

Yup. It seems it is not as easy as it looks from what you said. As I mentioned in post one, let us still have this in mind as a concept which we can work on at a later stage when Elk becomes famous. :excited:

To answer the question, Wedge has only one theme internally so the feature is effectively removed. Skins are stackable, nestable overrides of either of these (or all of them): CSS rules, layout settings (mobile oriented, sidebar position...), templates, and skeleton. A skeleton is a pseudo-XML map of all blocks in Wedge. A block is the equivalent of a layer on Wedge, only they can be put anywhere (including next to each other), can run code before or after them, and can be sub-templates as well.

All in all it's more powerful than themes, easier to grasp, and more importantly, no one but me seems to see that. Lol. But the system is only getting started and I've only documented the layout settings list, so it's no surprise.

The main goal is to ensure that major Wedge updates won't break compatibility with older skins. Just like plugins are here to solve the update problem with mods. Wedge aims to remains easy to update. That's all there is to say. And I will say no more because typing on a smartphone isn't that amusing. Ah ah.

If elk devs want to look into how I did it, I'd suggest looking into Class-Skeleton.php, it's my most OoP class ever so it's nice to look at. Skeletons are the best feature in the skin system, one of my proudest achievements, and it's not so hard to implement something similar into Elk.