I was mostly looking forward to improved design but was disappointed. It largely looks the same. I wish we could have something that is more similar to traditional forums like vbulletin or phpbb. At the very least, why can't we get a proper dark theme?
Hi @danniee ,
Thank you for your feedback! Actually, a very nice dark theme already exists in wpForo (probably you know it well), you just need to enable it in wpForo > Settings > Colors & Styles admin page. However, please keep in mind that if your WordPress theme uses a light design, enabling wpForo's dark style will create visual conflicts between the forum and the rest of your site, it'll change button, font and line colors making wpForo dark style looking ugly. Make sure your WordPress theme is also dark-styled, and then wpForo's dark mode will look great and blend seamlessly with your site.
Regarding the design, I understand your expectation, and I appreciate the honest feedback. The reason we chose a careful, mid-level redesign rather than a complete visual overhaul is that a full radical redesign would break every forum that has custom CSS customizations.
Many wpForo users have spent months fine-tuning their forum styles, and wiping all of that out with a completely new design would cause serious problems for thousands of active communities. We had to balance modernization with backward compatibility, and we believe we found the right middle ground.
That said, there are quite a lot of things that have been significantly refreshed in this version, all five forum layouts have a cleaner, more modern look, the member pages have been redesigned, the Topic Tags widget has a completely new flat design, we added the brand new "What's New" page with a timeline-based activity feed, and introduced the entirely new Boxed Layout (Layout 5) for a card-based forum experience. On top of that, we've fixed many long-standing design bugs and inconsistencies across the board.
We're continuing to improve the design with every update, so your specific suggestions are very welcome, let us know what areas you'd like to see improved and we'll consider them for upcoming releases.
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I wish we could have something that is more similar to traditional forums like vbulletin or phpbb.
About vBulletin and phpBB design: I'd encourage you to take a fresh look at what those platforms actually look like today:
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vBulletin — You can see a live demo here: https://sultantheme.com/vbulletin6/ — It still feels dated with a layout that hasn't fundamentally changed in many years. Many communities had a well-known discussion about vBulletin's release, and the general consensus was that it still feels behind modern web standards. To tell the truth there is no significant changes in XenForo design either.
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phpBB — Their default "prosilver" theme has barely changed in over a decade. You can see it yourself on their official demo: https://www.phpbb.com/styles/demo/
The reality is that traditional forum software like vBulletin and phpBB has largely stagnated in design. What looked modern in 2010 looks outdated today. wpForo 3.0 is a WordPress-native forum that benefits from the entire WordPress ecosystem modern themes and now AI-powered features that none of these traditional platforms offer.
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All fair points but I'm just saying, if you care to listen to my personal feedback, I was underwhelmed with the design. I fail to see why there can't be a proper dark theme with isolated classes and what not that you can just activate and all buttons and everything will look good and without users having to code and style broken elements themselves. Idk, for me it just hasn't worked.
It also didn't fix other things, like how you write posts and how this is handeled and presented on the frontend - you get weird line breaks and stuff. Forum can be a bit slow when posting, etc. I didn't quite see any real improvement.
Compared to more traditional forums like phpbb and invision board, I prefer those tbh, but atm I am still stuck with wpforo.
I don't mean to sound rude or disrespectful, these are just my opinions and experiences after using this software for many years. I appreciate the work you guys are doing and all, but with AI coding improving, if you don't stay on top of your game, soon enough people will design their own forum software. I am already considering it myself.
Long story short, I didn't see enough visual and mechanical improvement for me to get excited over this version, but that could also just be me. The AI stuff I don't really care so much for tbh.
@danniee Its always good to get lots of feedback, but I am really liking the look of the new design. Dark mode is easily fixable with the dark mode plug in, that is free, and most browsers have their own dark mode setting now too, its not really necessary to have it on your forum as if a user prefers it, they can have across all sites via a extension to chrome. brave or what ever browsers they use.
and for he old style forums, I hate the way they look, I think the wpforo design is far superior to php bb and vbulliten... but I suppose that's just a case of personal taste. But you can most likely change these designs yourself with some coding in custom CSS or even make a child theme or something and change the files back there?
There is always a way round I find, you just gotta figure out how to get there 🙂
Check out my Wpforo forum, lots of customisations and add ons 🙂
Percys Grow Room
@robert You're right. We spend months working on very detailed CSS. A lot of effort goes into these kinds of processes. We would be very disappointed if our CSS work went wrong.
Furthermore, wpforo's design is 10 times better than forum software like phpbb, smf, and mybb by default.
wpforo offers the ability to change the entire design with CSS from a single point. Other forum software doesn't offer this level of convenience.
Thank you @percysgrowroom and @plaka37 for your input,
wpForo has 5 forum layouts with 6 combination of color styles, that's 30 design combinations that comes by default. There is no other forum softwares allowing you such large flexibility in forum look and feel. And you can customize them very easily with colors selectors and custom CSS.
I'd recommend the Simplified Layout of wpForo 3.0 if you want to look it as classic forum. This layout is very close to the classic forums design:
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It's possible I just messed up somewhere along the way, because it just doesn't look great on my end. I think the mobile design needs some work too. For example how the user info looks all stacked (see img).
It's possible I just messed up somewhere along the way, because it just doesn't look great on my end. I think the mobile design needs some work too. For example how the user info looks all stacked (see img).
This and other issues with the layouts and dark theme have been fixed in v3.0.0.12 version: https://v3.wpforo.com/downloads/
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Is there also a way to fix the bulletpoints that we copy paste? This happens a lot:
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blavla— Ybla
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bla — text
Is there also a way to fix the bulletpoints that we copy paste? This happens a lot:
blavla— Ybla
bla — text
This is a copy paste issue, this is not a design issue. When you copy a list and paste to the TinyMCE rich editor, it automatically adds <p></p> paragraphs to list items. In short you should delete the extra line breaks after copy paste. Or it's better to remove the lists and make add the list back using the editor list buttons.
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