As you know, back in April we rolled out an updated front page designed to spotlight content here at PbNation and bring the site up to date a little.
Today I'm proud to announce some much needed changes that are scheduled for the forum side of things here at PbNation. Starting today, you can give what are going to become the new default themes for PbNation a test drive before they become the default at the end of the month.
We're going to roll these themes out in the coming weeks, and retire the existing themes. Yes, that's right, the default themes are going away. Believe it or not, less than 3% of all PbNation users use a theme other than the default, and it's become cumbersome to try and maintain a wide variety of themes that only a very small portion of users actually use.
That being said, here's a couple screenshots of the new themes:
(Click to embiggen)
PbNation 2013
PbNation Greys 2013
As you can see, these new themes are "fixed width," meaning they do not use 100% of the available screen width. This is common place in modern web design, as designing for what is known as "fluid" layouts is tedious to say the least. But fear not, because we know people would throw a hissy fit if we didn't give them a fluid option, we also have fluid versions of the existing themes available, with a caveat: I'll be designing for the fixed width themes, so there are no guarantees that things will look as good on the fluid layouts, so use them at your own risk.
If you'd like to try out the new themes, simply choose one from the style picker at the bottom of each page, or head into your
User CP and select one.
Let us know what you think, we're looking to iron out any remaining bugs before we go live with this across the entire site.
TL;DR Version
- We're rolling out 2 new themes on PbNation to give the site a fresh new look
- Soon after we launch these themes, we're retiring the old themes.
- Fixed width is far superior to fluid layouts, for a number of reasons. You'll still have a fluid layout to use, even if it makes layouts look dumb.
- Yes, you read that right, the old themes are going away. Only a small portion of the users use them, and they are old and busted.
- You're still stuck on this? They're going away, the new themes are way cooler and pretty similar to what you used anyway, get over it.