Hello!
First of all thanks for your template, I'm using a modified one on my clan's site
www.fed-pvp.de (all content in german).
The phpBB team has recently released their first beta of phpBB3, with a lot of great new stuff - and a new template system. I hope you'll release a ClanzDarkness3 for the phpBB when it is released (although they are chatting on a supersecret, ultracool, standard theme not even seen by the devs yet
).
However, I also wanted to to share some thoughts on the existing template too (meaning everything perfect except the following
):
First, I had some troubles with the topic reviews while answering a thread (afaik simple_header.tpl), on my site I had a black on white Times font.
The flash buttons is looking nice, but according to Google Analytics they are quite a waste (I've replaced them with GIF images so Analytics can track them), at least on my forum noone uses them. The FAQ even wasn't pressed once until I did it myself to be sure Analytics tracking is correct. On my site the Profile button was used at least sometimes, but everything else (including Search sadly) didn't deserve such a prominent placing. Looking nice, but not accepted by my visitors.
Categories on the main page: Every category has two rows, one containing Forum, Topics, Posts and Last post, and a second row containing the actual category name. IMHO you can the "forum" from the first row and replace it with the actual category name, sparing one column.
On the viewforum.php pages the "users browsing this forum" and moderator are above the thread topics, but users usually are more interested in content. I suggest displaying at the bottom, after the threads.
By design ClanzDarkness2 is already using a lot of space for graphical fluff (and I have to admit this was a reason for choosing it for my site). So avoiding/rearranging unused stuff would be quite nice for my low res laptop.
Greetings from Austria and keep up the good work.