It is that time again. Yesterday, we signed off our third preview: Preview 3. This update contains a couple of nice new features. It’s also the first preview following our new update scheme. Either way, it isn’t as big as an update as Preview 1 and 2. More changes come to Preview 3 in future updates.
Update scheme
First off – and this is not a feature – you’ll see us release updates on a more regular base. We’ve planned 2 more updates for Preview 3 this month alone. Perhaps a third one will come in early March. After that, we hope to have reached a point where we can say: yes, this can be Preview 4. And ya’ll know what comes after Preview 4, right? Beta 1.
Theme Engine 6 Preview 3
We made major improvements to our Theme Engine 6 once again. We now support parent themes. This means that one theme can inherit everything from another team unless it overwrites this within itself. We’ve included a very nice example in Preview 3. Further, we now also support more customization, especially Inbox has been improved. Again: more changes to the engine are coming, don’t start developing your themes yet. Another change this update brings is that users can no longer select a style for their own.
Sunset and Sunrise
Sunset is a new theme in Preview 3. It uses Sunrise as its parent. Sunset is a more classic way of doing things, with forums and categories only on the index. Subforum support is included, through. On its turn, Sunrise got some changes to support child themes. We’ve made some major improvements to the responsive design of Sunrise, too. Keep in mind that both Sunset and Sunrise are still a work in progress.
Login for Backstage and update
We’ve added a login interface for the Backstage. In case your theme might break the Mainstage login form, you can always fall back on this Backstage replacement for it. We’ve also used the same design for our new update dialogue.
Security improvements
Further, the Backstage will now ask you to remove install.php for security reasons. We’ve also fixed another security bug.
Inbox
We’ve also made some major work on Inbox. We’ve decided to take a distance from Contacts and Lists and only provide the PM feature. However, not just thing that got removed: we’ve merged the Inbox page with the profile. In the next preview, you’ll find even more improvements to the interface of Inbox.
Soft delete
Preview 3 comes with support for soft delete. With this feature, you can remove posts from sight without removing them from the board. The current implementation only changes the post’s design to a yellow variation on reported posts. Preview 3 Update 1 will improve the implementation and actually hide the post from members. A new permission will be added to groups, and moderators will be able to soft delete posts by default. It will also be possible to re-enable these posts.
Components
Further, we’ve updated Bootstrap from version 3.3.1 to 3.3.2. Font Awesome also got updated from version 4.2.0 to 4.3.0. However, we do not include all Font Awesome styles anymore. We’ve removed a couple of font formats to reduce the size of the Font Awesome package. Bootstrap got trimmed too. We’ve removed support for Glyphicons as we didn’t include them anyway. No worries, the final release of Luna 1.0 Aero will load Bootstrap, jQuery and Font Awesome from a CDN and include all support you might need.
More changes
Futher, we no longer show the Moved-entries from topics on the index. The editor got some minor interface improvements. The user list got a facelift and the Theme settings page has been improved. Emojis now have a default size of 16px instead of 14px and we made major improvements to the database. We’ve also added the first notifications for users (if you’re subscribed on a thread and someone comments on it, you’ll get a notification), decreased the size of our package and made improvements to the performance of Luna. Further, you can expect the usual bug fixes.
You can find the Preview at the usual location: on our websites download page. Continue to note that this is still a Preview release and bugs are to be expected. We’ll continue to make improvements and add new features to Luna in the coming months until we hit beta 1. After that, the fun can really begin. Expect Preview 3 Update 1 later this month and Preview 3 Update 2 around the end of this month or early March. Enjoy!
