[quote user="Doctor Floggin"]
Was there a need for this new layout, or was it simply given a facelift for the sake of giving it a facelift?
What changes have been made apart from the look? I haven't noticed anything different (yet).
One really basic feature that I'd like to see, which seemingly all other forums have, yet this one (still) hasn't.. Is the click to last/unread posts feature. Every topic always puts you on page one and then you have to click again to the last/latest posts.
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The main reason for the change was that page width was needed to become more "fluid" - responsive - so it would adapt to any size people are accessing the site. Theme change wasn't done to give "facelift", we didn't need any change for colors/design itself or for the sake of it. But they changed on the way, since we took Twitter bootstrap engine as our base platform and everything was re-coded from grounds up on top of it. Most of the features (button/text sizes, top menu etc.) are from Twitter bootstrap engine. Using that as a basis, we got a platform that is pre-tested to work with mobile.
See here how our current theme look quite 100% same as a default twitter theme: http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/ . When resizing the window, both our site and BootStrap -site response the same way, giving a solid experience for end users. It also provides support and upgrade path for PeachyForum UI, in the future it's easy to fix and update it to support different devices with minimal work.
Twitter Bootstrap a new flexible engine, allowing rendering everything for multiple channels - tablets, mobile phones in addition to PC's. Every month bigger percentage of visitors use other then mouse and display.
Porn is much personal nowadays, you may surf while your wife is on the same room using some small mobile phablet. That's what we're now optimized for, everything is easier to click, and if you turn the display the layout adapts. That's what I see as a future, not for PeachyForum, but for Internet as general.
I understand the frustration, I didn't hire any graphical designers to do any UI "facelifts" and the target wasn't to make everything to look good. Main motive was to employ the new engine the "hybrid" site of BootStrap+PF is what you see now. But since we've added features with multiple upgrades, then last time changed rendering engine, maybe the next upgrade is a real facelift with real UI design change? Some pixel-perfect cool theme truly sounds great. Maybe we would need multiple versions/suggestions before we dare to take a bigger leap from our current UI? At least if the current is worse then the old one, maybe we should just try a new theme "facelift" as our next upgrade, without adding anything else.