Blog Post
I know your struggle.
Short answer, consider all customizations null n void as everything “maybe not everything but close to it” in my experience will need rebuilding.
I’ll be honest I hate boiler plate forums and I’ve done everything in my power since 2007 when I did my first one to make them as visual and engaging as possible and this means vast customization normally because all templates and OTB stuff is table after table box after box filled with text on text, no thanks, you can checkout the befores on the way back machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20201218134835/https://community.talktalk.co.uk/
my community was getting a little dated we also had a new brand which had gone live so I made the conscious jump to redesign the entire site based on Hermès aligned to new brand but with the customization we wanted to keep, was a pretty big piece of work and completed on shoestring budget so wasn’t fast we also found that some stuff in Hermès didn’t work like it did on the old responsive peak like labels widgets in blogs was odd so we had to modify the design as we built as we wanted to try and use as much of OTB as possible
but I’m glad I did but that’s mostly due to our new branding looking better than any transformation Hermès has brought again because we’re customized a fair bit
just my opinion so feel free to ignore but if I was looking to do the same “right now” I wouldn’t unless there was significant pressure internally to update your sites look n feel. The one and only reason why I say this is because of Aurora.
Whilst we don’t know a lot about this yet, one thing is clear it’s a total rework of everything and will “I hope” flip the community product on its head “for the better” making our life much easier to build and tweak pages
So, the reason I wouldn’t do a Hermès “rebuild” right now is that you very likely will have to do an Aurora “rebuild/migration” now if this is 2 years out who cares but it doesn’t feel like it’s that far away and I know the product guys have been working on it for a long time so I’m excited it could drop soon in beta or early release and if you can wait till then and get in as early adopter it may be the wiser move.
just my thoughts…. And I have no issues with Hermès it worked well the new default layouts for category and board pages making use of images for example was a nice step forward.