I've been tinkering around with the visual elements of our forum lately, and I wanted to share some of the changes that Kailey and I have made.
You've probably noticed that we've moved away from our long-time Revolution style. This was a two-fold decision. Firstly, Revolution wasn't very responsive by default. While someone offered a better responsive version(which we appreciated, cabot), it would have made updating our forum style more difficult with each phpBB version update, even with the patch files.
Secondly, even on my 14-inch laptop, Revolution felt like it wasted a lot of screen space. I can only imagine what it looked like on larger screens and Retina displays. We've also had people complain about this in the past, so it was time for a change.
We opted for prosilver_se (LINK) because it's more responsive and utilizes screen space more effectively. With a bit of customization, we were able to tailor it to our needs. It is used on here and at our archive board at https://phpbbmodders.net with added gradients to differentiate the two boards.
I've replaced all the standard prosilver icons with the official prosilver vectorised GDK ones (LINK). To make it work, I had to tweak the "vector_icons" (LINK) extension to make it compatible with phpBB 3.3. I think the GDK icons look better, especially at different zoom levels, and they feel more polished than the standard phpBB 3.3 icons at higher resolutions.
I also replaced the online user icon with a new one (found on the phpBB forum, submitted to the CDB but never approved, as phpBB didn't support SVG's at the time), and experimented with a red version. I'm not sure if red is better (it matches the board) than the original green, so let me know what you think! Images below:
Color corrected for phpbbmodders to "#aa0000":
In original color as mentioned above "#00AA00":
Speaking of visual tweaks, I also did a bit of a smilie upgrade. I grabbed rednoah's vector-remastered PNG version of phpBB's smilies (you can find them here: LINK), and replaced some of our old smilies with the newer versions. I figure this will make the smilies look nicer when people are viewing the forum on larger/higher resolution screens. In case anyone wants to add the png's to theirs, the smilie.pak file is below, upload it and the png's to your smilies folder. On the install page, select the pak file. Then select, "Replace matches" and submit. It should of replaced all the default gif's with the new PNG's. Then delete pak file.
The updated smilies:
