Figured I'd post a quick look at the current state of the new design:



A couple of things to note about this design:
  • It will use your forum login/password/cookie to determine who you are
  • You will be able to select the theme (colors), font sizes, the size of the news box, the number of posts in the forum threads section, and what 'plugins' you'd like in the right column. Plugins will be things like 'Team Project Ranks', 'Top Forum Posters', 'Newest Members', and a handful of tie-ins with the Arachnid system for those projects that it supports. These will let you setup custom graphs for your homepage, etc.
  • It should work pretty gracefully at 1024x768 all the way out to 1600x1200.
  • It will eventually have a custom version for use on mobile devices (PDAs, phones, etc)


BTW, for those interested, this isn't a mockup, but the actual design rendered in Galeon. It looks nearly identical in IE.I've also got a fully functioning forum setup for this site using the latest v3 of vbulletin with a matching color scheme. Our current forum is v2 and there are some nice new features in the v3 code.