Hey there! Welcoming myself to CI, with a twist.

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]

Still, im disappointed that theme/templates in this "cms" is so hard to.. grasp.

Allow me to disabuse you of the notion that CI is a CMS.

What your programmer may have written for you is a CMS - it's hard to say from here - but CI is a framework.

While it might sound like a game of semantics at your end, the difference is not especially subtle - a framework provides the tools and infrastructure to write your own application - any kind of application.

A CMS is one specific type of application (and under that heading there are dozens of approaches).

A drop-in-themeable system is an impressive feat, to be sure, because the theme (a bunch of CSS and image files) needs to be able to work with the rest of the system, so generally themes take a bit of effort to rattle up, and are quite site-specific. It's possible that your programmer developed the system to allow for themes from a given app - wordpress, joomla, or something else - to be dropped in. Again, it's hard to say from here. It's more likely, given the budget constraints that you've mentioned, that they wrote a system that is a tad more selfish with its theme designs and requirements.

For forums - there's no 'drop in' forum available, though Phil's writing one, and I know Fuzzy is writing / has finished one, and I'm writing one. At least two of those are going to be free in the pleasant sense of the word, but equally they're not quite ready yet. They're also not going to be hugely generalised, so there'll still be some pain to wedge those into an extant codebase.

We're basically back to the same problem as before - CI is a framework that people write their own code for - not a modular CMS that people write modules for.

EDIT: Oh, for your clear CSS stuff, have a look through your common CSS file, as your programmer probably already has a section - usually a div, usually called clear, usually looks something like the following.

Code:

/*********************************************************************
* Clear
*/
.clear {
    clear: both;
    display: block;
    overflow: hidden;
    visibility: hidden;
    width: 0;
    height: 0;
}