The new theme structure for Active Forums was developed based upon several years of feedback and what we have learned from the theme and template structure with Active Social.  The new structure and template engine was built based upon the following goals:

1. Improve the rendering of pages and reduce the overall HTML payload of each request.
2. Make it easier for customers that only want to make one or two cosmetic items instead of creating an entire new theme. 
   
3. Improve the organization of templates.
4. Replace all controls that include HTML with templates.
5. Reduce the quantity and size of files included with the install package.

I have already covered goal number one in a previous blog post.  It would take hours to try and summarize all the rendering and css optimizations we have made with the release.  We are still finding additional ways to optimize even further.  On average, the HTML payload for each page view in Active Forums was reduced by 35%.

Quite often we will receive a support request or see a post in the forums where a customer just wants to make one minor change to the default design.  In most cases, the customer would need to create a new theme and copy all the existing files.  Here are a couple screen shots that illustrate the before and after.

Active Forums 4.1
	The old method only allowed for one template folder.  This meant that you could not have unique templates per theme.  Also, each theme contained a minimum of 140 files.  The module.css file was also unique per theme.  If you wanted to make one change you would need to copy the _default theme directory, rename it, then change the module.css to meet your needs.
New & Improved Active Forums!
	The module.css file has been moved to the root of the themes directory.  The module.css contains all the default styling elements.  Notice the templates directory has been moved under the themes directory. You will also see an images directory in the root of the themes folder and another under the specific theme.  Now that nearly every graphic element within Active Forums can be managed through CSS, you can easily create a new theme by simply overriding the default style from within theme.

We have tried to reduce the number of templates and creating additional tokens where possible.  We would like to have a default templates folder and allow you to only include the changed template within your theme, but that may come in a later release. 

Hopefully this gives you a glimpse of how we have been able to optimize the template and theme engine within Active Forums while providing additional functionality. 

Before the release we will cover how to create a theme, change graphic elements and modify templates.