Forum:10 Days Until 4th Anniversary Relaunch

I'm happy to say that the project is going on smoothly, but time is certainly creeping up on us. Here is a list of every project going into the relaunch:


 * New Front Page
 * New Banner: Monobook
 * New Banner & CSS: Monaco
 * New Features
 * New Featured Article design & system
 * BBS Official Launch
 * Creation & work on special pages

New Front Page
This project is going well. The working design is at Forum:Main_Page_Test and is designed to work in both Monobook and Monaco. Recently, work on the new header and css has caused discussion there to stall, but there are still some things that need to be finalized. They are:


 * Overall color scheme
 * New Features

The overall color scheme of the page seems to be green. I did however change the Terminology panel to reflect a more ALTIMIT color scheme and thus far received very little feedback about which direction we should go.

Of the new features in the new design is ".hack//This Month" which lists trivia about the .hack world for the current month. Since the consensus is that this is a "good idea," we're keeping it. I'm considering getting rid of the hexagon pictures though, mainly because they frankly suck. There is a long column on the right where we could insert a new feature or two. A "quote of the moment" feature has been suggested, but that alone won't fill up that space.

New Banner / Style
This is a hot topic at the moment. See the background image topic at the Apkallu forum for the discussion. For quick reference, here are the potential styles that I'm seriously considering:

Monobook

 * Key of the Twilight (Dark)
 * Key of the Twilight (light)
 * ALTIMIT
 * ALTIMIT Green

Monaco

 * Key of the Twilight
 * ALTIMIT
 * ALTIMIT Green

I also need to change the sidebars on both themes so they list everything important for easy access.

Featured Article
You can see the new design for the Featured Article in the test page. I've already implemented the new system, so all that's left is PARTICIPATION.

BBS
I've been pretty slow when it comes to working on the BBS. Currently, there are three live forums: the Chaos Gate for general topics, the Apkallu for images, and the Test Forum for the current project; it will be deleted after the relaunch. What I want are ideas for new boards and names. I've decided to be not as stuck-up when it comes to titles though, so just bring yourself over to this page and throw out all your ideas.

Special Pages
I have the Manual of Style up and online. It's still a work in progress; please add to it if you have something to contribute. I desperately want to clean up the Community Portal and assign a specific purpose to it, as well as direct users to an appropriate alternative page for different topics. This is something that I've been working on on paper, but haven't been able to implement for whatever reason. What I want is for there to be a specific place for users to:


 * Communicate with the .hack community (Chaos Gate)
 * Learn about how to contribute according to our policy (Help and Manual of Style)
 * Easily find articles that they can work on and get off cleanup (Probably a section in Community Portal)
 * Request articles (Requests)
 * Make suggestions of features for possible use on the Wiki (Uh...)
 * Ask questions relating to wiki policy (Hm...)
 * Other stuff that I can't label at the moment

In a nutshell, everything that's currently on the Community Portal, I would like to spread out to an appropriate place for that category of discussion, and I want to make sure that every user knows what is the right section for those discussions. It's a bit of a tough subject for me figure out, really.