Free SMF theme

Dark Meridian

A tactical military gaming theme for SMF 2.1: a command-centre board index with a radar sweep and live stats, boards as mission cards, posts as operator cards and three colour variants.

  • Free download
  • For SMF 2.1, tested on 2.1.7
  • Version 1.0.0
  • BSD-3-Clause licence
Dark Meridian theme for Simple Machines Forum: tactical command-centre board index with a radar panel, live stats and green mission cards
Dark Meridian theme for Simple Machines Forum: tactical command-centre board index with a radar panel, live stats and green mission cards

About Dark Meridian

Dark Meridian turns your forum into a tactical operations network. A slim system bar and a command header with numbered menu tabs sit at the top, and the board index opens on a Command Centre panel with a radar sweep over a topographic map and live counts of members, posts, topics and who's online.

Categories become numbered theatres and boards become mission cards, each with a new-posts marker, topic and post counts, the latest post and its sub-boards. The topic list marks pinned, locked, poll and busy topics with clear labels, and you set how many replies make a topic "High activity". In topics, every poster gets an operator card with a framed avatar, rank, post count and join date. Quotes are styled as intercepted transmissions and code blocks as a terminal. Login, search, profiles, messages and the admin centre get matching headers.

It comes in three colour variants: Night Vision (green, the default), Thermal (amber) and Arctic (ice blue), and members can pick their own unless you switch that off. On phones the menu becomes a slide-out drawer and posts get a compact operator strip.

Dark Meridian is an original, unofficial fan design: it uses no game artwork, logos or fonts from any publisher and isn't affiliated with Activision or Call of Duty. Its fonts are bundled, so nothing loads from outside services.

  • A command centre for gaming forums Radar sweep, topographic map and live forum stats on the board index.
  • Mission cards and operator cards Boards as cards with unread markers; posters as operator cards with rank, posts and join date.
  • Three colour variants Night Vision, Thermal and Arctic; members can choose their own.
  • Settings, not code Set the header callsign, activity thresholds, hide the hero panel or turn animations off in Admin > Theme Settings.
  • Accessible and light Skip link, visible focus, WCAG AA text contrast, reduced-motion support, one small script and self-hosted fonts.

Colours

  • #070909
  • #111615
  • #1c2422
  • #8df06a
  • #f2a93b

Install it in a couple of minutes

You need admin access to your forum. Keep the .zip as it is: SMF installs it from the archive.

  1. Open Themes and Layout. In your forum go to Admin, then Configuration, then Themes and Layout, and open the Manage and Install tab.
  2. Install from the archive. Under the option to install a new theme from an archive, choose the Dark Meridian .zip and upload it.
  3. Make it the default. Still on Manage and Install, set the overall forum default to Dark Meridian and save.

The full guide, with troubleshooting

Need somewhere to host your SMF forum? Run it on Traxio hosting: your first month is free, then it’s £0.99 a month. The themes are free whether you host with us or not. Forum hosting

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