I think I fell in love with it all over again.

Default user profile in Salerno 2.0.

Default character profile in Salerno 2.0.

Forum view is not quite done in Salerno 2.0, but you can get the idea of it.

Mobile mode on Eros 2.0.

Mobile mode on Eros 2.0.

Quick peek at what Gaia Salerno's Eros 2.0 will look like. Currently, it's not liable to have a banner by default.

Wanted to share this with you guys; this is what the back-end theme template coding looks like in Gaia: Salerno (version 2). So creating a theme will be dealing in basically straight up HTML, you will be accessing and using PHP variables and expressions, but they'll be simplified. Even I'm finding some awesomeness in the simplification. Salerno doesn't have a release timeline, as of now, since I need to rewrite all the templates in both the front-end and admin-panel versions of Eros, it may take a few weeks before I'm ready to move on from the template system.

And this here is what happens when you edit a post, start changing it and thus end up with a draft of it, and then come back to it again later. Gaia will ask if you'd rather start from scratch, or use the draft of it that you have saved in the system. This way, if you start editing a post and then your computer or browser go dumb, you have the choice of starting over, or using the draft that exists.

And here we have Alpha 9's new topic display, with the topic header up there too. There are a few things that aren't shown here that also load on this page, so most things you might want *should* already be in the arrays for you.

Finally doing some front-end stuff. This is Alpha 9's topic list, complete with tags and everything.

So basically, this is exciting. Say hello to Gaia's theme editor in easy mode. There are, of course, options in there to add new variants, you can also create a new theme altogether and add variants to it. Each variant has this screen here, where you can tell it what settings to use, what fonts to load from Google, if any, and then set the body and header font families, sizes, set all the colours, and upload a favicon, background image, or banner image, and Gaia will take care of the rest. I actually *think* I have gotten a little further on handling theme template alteration in easy-mode, so that'll be a cool. (It's still being an asshole, guys, but I'm showing it what-for.)

Preview of what an affiliate block looks like, too. Top, left, bottom, right, so you can essentially surround your entire site's content area in blocks if that is what you want to do. They will move above the content area, for top and left blocks, and below it, for right and bottom blocks, on smaller screens.

Custom blocks!

This is Alpha 8's affiliation system. It kind of explains itself, but basically, one-click approve affiliate requests, temporarily hide affiliates from appearing in the affiliate block, edit, delete them. Users on front-end, if it is enabled, can apply for affiliation, and the button and link won't appear without being approved by a staffer. You can also set your button size and affiliation rules in the core settings, and these will be presented to the user when they apply. Users can also request changes to an existing affiliation, and upload a new button, change their URL, whatever, and approving those will swap the details of the request into the existing affiliate entry.

What PMs look like in Alpha 6.

This is the denial page in the admin panel's approval queue. How this works is, you click reject, and it will take you to this page. Here, you fill out the rejection/denial message to tell the user why this character was denied, and it will create a direct message conversation with the user, using the message input here. So you can just skip the rejection explanation, Gaia prompts you for it and handles the nitty gritty of it for you.

This is the alert staff members will receive when approval is on, and there's a new pending character. This is pinging for my character and I'm staff, also it's mine, and it will skip approval queue for site owners and also not alert staff for their own character, but it is a thing!

The online list is actually quite precise!

Child boards now show up in the forum arrays in forum management within the admin panel.

This is what a board that has new posts in behaves like. It can be changed at will by just editing the template; it's just a true:false boolean, nothing fancy.

This is how new messages in a topic are handled. If a message ID is beyond the last read message ID for the user, posts beyond it are marked new like here.

This is the board index and topics index view with character things involved. Kassander also has a rotating avatar, so his avatar will change on each page load.

This is what editing a post that was posted by a character looks like. Because joint-posts require a user that does not own a given character be able to edit their posts, I needed a way of ensuring the original posting character didn't get knocked out of it by virtue of not being in the user's drop. My solution was to create a separate group for the original poster's ID and name, and just take it out of the regular drop if the user does happen to have the character in it. This way, players can edit on the same post all day long and not have the posting character change unless one does it on purpose.