What sucked the most about custom post types?

[thecodedrift]

This question came from the old anonymous AMA I used to have. In relaunching the AMA concept on GitHub Discussions, I wanted to bring over as many of these as I could

[thecodedrift]

Oh that's easy. Going from table tags to div tags. The original phpBB used tables for layout, and the posts on Gaia were no exception. The forum was layers of nested tables... a development nightmare. Thankfully, CSS came to the rescue. In bad ASCII terms, a forum post could lay out like:

| avatar | post region |
|        |             |
|      b | 1    2    3 |
|        | 4    5    6 |
| a    c | 7    8    9 |

With the post consisting of a 9-box region (and the post content in position 5). Any speech bubbles or tails we wanted to add such as the start of a thought bubble would be in position b or c, the corners of the post in 1, 3, 7, and 9, and repeating regions on the cardinal edges. On the surface, it still looked like a table, but we could just flip the float property to reverse the entire forum post and not have to maintain separate left and right templates anymore.

[thecodedrift]

As I was porting this over, I realized just how much easier this could have been if flexbox existed at the time.