CB Template Changer does not apply to anything outside of the users profile so that's working as expected. If you want your template to globally apply then you need to set that within CB > Configuration > User Profile.

We don't have plans at this time to allow template changing outside of profile. The feature is meant to allow users to select how their profile displays to themselves and to others. The original intent was for custom templates with different profile layouts to be used, but then the Template Builder was implemented and most are just using it to change some colors.

With CB 3.x there won't be template plugins anymore or CB plugins for that matter as they'll be turned into standalone Joomla extensions. See my blog post for further details regarding this . We'll simply provide Joomla layouts that you can override with Joomla and use entirely Joomlas template system. You would then be able to have what you're wanting there using Joomla templates.

Ok I read through your blog entries. I can see the value of it because everything is currently based on the profile community builder and it restricts your users.

Yup, the main issue we face today is everything is coupled to the profile. This isn't really necessary for pretty much all our plugins. Most just entirely function off basic information like name/username/avatar/canvas which can be generalized in our API library. Then you could for example use CB Activity and CB Gallery without needing anything else. You could also use CB fields in other extensions as well since we want to turn our fieldtypes into Joomla fieldtypes.

Another big issue is we're having to maintain our own installer system, our own plugin management system, our own router system, our own controller system, etc.. for plugins. This all goes away by making them independent Joomla extensions, which significantly reduces the code we have to maintain. This is a large part of why SEF routing for a lot of plugins is just not great.

A lot of work is going to go into making CB a bigger part of Joomla. Joomla 4 being a very well designed modern framework was a huge deciding factor in this as we originally were going to make a Symfony app and try and embed that into Joomla.

I am just not looking forward to migration of my hugely complex site, but then again even migrating it to Joomla 4 may be a huge challenge

Migration should be entirely automated with CB 3.x as we'll be using Joomla installer SQL files to handle moving all the database data with some PHP side parsing (hopefully minimally as fast queries would be more ideal). I will likely use new database table names for everything and migrate the data safely and quickly to the new structure leaving the old tables intact for safety reasons and to minimize risk of data loss. There's going to be some manual work involved of course as some parameters will go away, some new ones added, etc.. but for the majority of it there should be little work to contend with.