New Simple:Press Forum Theme: Modern 2020

Posted on Mar 05, 2020

A new default theme is coming to Simple:Press Forums with the release of Simple:Press Forums 6.5.0.

Features of this theme:

More modern looking with larger default font sizes and button sizes.
Less use of tiny icons
More color customization options
Better display on mobile
More white space

Just like our previous default theme, Barebones, you can customize the colors of many elements. However, unlike that theme, we are including pre-defined color overlays so that you can more easily match your site colors with a couple of clicks.

Here is a sneak preview of how this new theme looks when using the WP-2020-Theme-Color overlay with the WordPress 2020 theme:

Some Additional Colors

Here are some of the overlays that we are shipping with this theme. Do you see the pattern?

Custom Overlay

When you choose the Custom overlay, you get a customizer menu option where you can choose your own colors. You’ll notice that, unlike the Barebones theme customizer, this one gives you a better idea of what each color affects. The image below shows the colors that are used inside our admin area:

And here is how those selections get reflected on the front-end:

Rethinking Mobile

We’ve switched the mobile look to more closely reflect the “cards” that are now prevalent on many apps. While you still don’t get a native look and feel (since it is a web-app) , you do get a more familiar interface without a lot of horizontal scrolling. Take a look:

In the above image, the top area is the forum group header and the bottom area is the forum information for one of the forums in the group.

Here are two more examples:

Individual topics inside forums also get the “card” look. There is room for some improvement here but we’ll wait for feedback before doing further work: