First of all, we bought Avalanche a phpBB 3 premium theme.
The theme looked good until we discovered that all the buttons to “modify a post”, “delete a post”, “report a post” or “quote a post” disappeared and it was not possible to modify, delete or report a post. After buying different phpBB themes we discovered that there were always issues related to the themes.
With the phpBB theme bulletin, we had an issue when we wanted to modify the color of different items that were originally apple green. There were a customizer to change the color and it downloaded a small CSS file to our computer. In the code of the theme, it was mentioned that we could upload a custom.css. So we pasted the code in the custom.css where it was mentioned in the code. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Then, we added “!important” to every CSS directives and it was a mess because we could not read the fonts anymore.
I have ended buying the Milk phpBB3 theme from themeforest which works well and give the opportunity to modify the theme without CSS. But then, there were issues related to phpBB itself. For example, there is no embedded plugin to make the URLs SEO friendly. Setting up the user permissions is very complicated. Googlebot scans pages that should not been scanned like the list of live users.
Conclusion:
This investigation about phpBB themes took us 3 day work. We spent a total of $111 US dollars buying themes for phpBB which could have been equal to a Xenforo license in 2017.