What the goose happened here?

[Clidus]

Hey guys,

We upgraded the forum software this evening and unfortunately didn't expect it to be incompatible with the Citadel theme.

We'll have to live with the phpBB default look for a day or two while I rebuild the theme from scratch.

Apologies; we'll have those glorious shades of green back shortly.

The place looks... kinda naked doesn't it?

~ Clidus

[R. Kasahara]

FYI (and Clidus already knows this), I've started work on a complete overhaul of the Citadel's default forum theme, which future optional themes will also be based on. This won't be ready right away, but the forum's software upgrade was necessary to make this happen in the first place. In the meantime, we'll be fixing whatever's broken and, at the very least, get things looking black and green again. Thanks for your patience!

[Clidus]

Okay, I've restored the general colour scheme of the forums.

You're likely to see some odd colours and styles, especially in corners, but we're getting there.

[R. Kasahara]

Hey everyone, and welcome to your new and improved Citadel Forums!

As you can see, I finished the promised redesign, but that's not all. If you go into your User Control Panel (accessed via the dropdown menu from your name at the top), and click on "Board Preferences", you should now notice that there's an option to change the forum theme ("My board style"). Besides the default theme, called Citadel Green, there's two others to choose from:

Remake Steel
This is our new, FFVII Remake-inspired "black/grey" theme, with stylized Shinra logos for forum/thread icons.

Theatrhythm Red
Instead of doing yet another Vincent theme for the color red, I decided to make a cute one inspired by the Theatrhythm Final Fantasy games.

Please note that I may continue to do some small tweaks and fixes here and there, but nothing major. Additional themes may be added if there is enough demand for them and if traffic picks up by a good amount.

And to give credit where it's due, all three of these themes are customized versions of PBTech by PayBas. Customizations and testing were done by me, with some additional testing, general assistance, and advice from Clidus and Cyrus.

------

Getting around these new themes

There's some differences between this new layout (and phpBB version) and our previous one, but here's the main issues people might run into.

- Edit post icons are hidden by default - If you need to edit or delete your post, or quote or report someone else, mouse over that post and a set of icons should appear in the upper right. If you mouse over each icon, a description of what it does will appear.
- User Control Panel access - As previously mentioned, the User CP can be found by clicking on your name in the upper left corner of the screen (beneath the main search bar), which brings up a menu. You can also view your profile and log out here.

------

Note that these new themes are not the only changes made to the board. A number of other new features have been added as well.

MAJOR NEW PROFILE FEATURES
- Default avatar - All accounts without avatars now have a default one featuring Cloud's silhouette.
- Support for larger avatars - The maximum allowed avatar size is now 100x100 pixels.
- Custom Title - Displays a user title of your choice, which goes under your name in your posts. See the sidebar of my post here as an example.
- User Bio - A larger dedicated area to tell the community more about yourself on your profile page. Unfortunately, bbcode can't be used, but we will try and get it working for the future. See my profile for an example.
- More contact options - With the forums upgrade, contact fields have been added for Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and YouTube, and, in addition, there are now options to add your Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Miiverse, and/or Steam info. Again, see my profile for an example.

MAJOR NEW FORUMS FEATURES
- User names on the left-hand side in threads - Self-explanatory. Glad to have this sort of layout in place again
- Recent posts on the front page - Instead of visiting individual forums, you can choose to check out the latest updated threads right from the Forums' index page.
- Link back to the Citadel - The Citadel itself can now be accessed directly by clicking on the "Main Site" link near the top of every page.
- Immediate automatic redirection - You will now be immediately redirected back to the thread after making a new post, or editing a preexisting one.

There are some other, smaller changes, but that covers the basics.

If you have any feedback to offer and/or bugs to point out about the new layouts, please do so here. As usual, general feature requests go in this thread. Thanks, and enjoy

[SOLDIERofficer81]

Nice job, everyone. And thanks for the hard work.

[Clidus]

Awesome job!

Really like the new look.

[The Slider]

Keep up the goose work!