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Moving from a Legacy Theme to CloudRadial Fluent

David Falkenberg
  • Updated

 

If your portal is on one of the older themes — Default, Dark, White, Steel or either Teams theme — moving to CloudRadial Fluent is a single setting. The change itself takes a minute. What it changes for your users is worth five minutes of reading first.

This article covers what to check before you switch, what changes at the moment you do, and what to look at afterwards.

What You Gain

  • Light and dark mode, with a dark palette designed alongside the light one rather than derived from it
  • Per-user appearance choice — Light, Dark or System, with System following the device or the Microsoft Teams theme live
  • A second brand color — the primary color that drives buttons, links and selected items, on top of the title bar color you already have
  • A separate dark-mode logo for the portal home page
  • Live color previews on the Branding tab, showing the actual bar and the actual buttons rather than a swatch

The legacy themes still work and are still supported. They are not being developed further, and none of the features above are coming to them.

Before You Switch

Four things are worth doing first. None of them is mandatory, and all of them save a ticket.

1. Note your current Title Bar Color. Go to Partner > Settings > Account & Branding > Branding and look at the Title Bar Color field. If it is empty, or set to #000000, your bar will become CloudRadial navy (#22335a) after the switch. That is the Fluent default for a Partner who has not chosen a color. If you want to keep a black bar, type #000000 into the Bar Color field after switching so it is an explicit choice rather than an unset default.

2. Prepare a dark-mode home page logo. The logo at the top of the portal home page sits on a background that flips between near-white and near-black. If yours is drawn in a single ink color, it will be hard to read in one of the two modes. You can upload the dark variant before you switch — the field is there on legacy themes and simply has no effect until Fluent is on. See Logos and Images Across the Portal.

3. Decide whether users may choose their own appearance. Selecting CloudRadial Fluent turns Allow users to choose their own theme on for you. If you want everyone on one appearance, clear it in the same visit.

4. Check any client-level branding overrides. Clients with Apply custom branding for this company? turned on have their own Base Theme, and they do not follow the partner setting. Moving those clients is the same change on each client's Branding tab.

Making the Change

  1. Go to Partner > Settings > Account & Branding.
  2. Select the Branding tab.
  3. In the Theme section, set Base Theme to CloudRadial Fluent.
  4. Set Default Mode — System is the usual choice, and follows each user's device.
  5. Tick or clear Allow users to choose their own theme as you decided above.
  6. Save.

The Branding tab regroups itself as soon as Fluent is selected: colors are now grouped by surface, with a Light Mode and a Dark Mode column in each group. Your existing title bar color and logos carry across; nothing is cleared.

What Changes for Your Users

Everyone gets the new look on their next page load. There is no per-user migration to run and nothing for your clients to do.

Users who had picked a legacy theme are moved to Fluent. If a user had chosen, say, the Steel theme, that choice no longer applies — legacy themes are not selectable on a Fluent portal, so the portal treats the stored preference as though it had not been made and gives them your Default Mode instead. Their stored preference is not deleted; if you ever move the portal back to a legacy theme, it returns.

This is worth telling anyone who is likely to notice. The handful of users who deliberately set a theme are the ones who will spot it first.

The theme picker in a user's profile changes. Where it used to be a Theme tab listing the legacy themes, it becomes an Appearance tab offering System, Light and Dark. It only appears at all if you allow user theme choice.

"Override theme when running in Microsoft Teams" no longer applies. That checkbox is not offered on Fluent and is not honoured there. Default Mode = System replaces it and does the same job for more people — inside Teams it follows the Teams theme, and in a browser it follows the device. The stored setting is untouched, so it works again if you move back to a legacy theme.

Your title bar stays the color you set it to, in both modes. Fluent does not darken your brand color for dark mode. If you want a different bar color in dark mode, set one in the Dark Mode column; if you leave it blank, your light color is used as-is.

After You Switch

Five minutes with the portal in both modes will catch everything that usually goes wrong. Use the Appearance tab in your own profile to flip between Light and Dark.

  • Look at the home page in dark mode. This is where a single-ink logo disappears. If it does, upload a dark-mode Home Page logo.
  • Look at the title bar in both modes. It should be the same color and the same logo in each. If the logo is hard to read, you are missing one of the two title-bar variants — upload both and the portal picks for you.
  • Look at a button and a link. If your brand color is dark and dark mode looks muddy, set an explicit dark Primary Color. If you have not set a primary color at all, you will see the theme default: #0067b8 in light mode and #5c9fff in dark.
  • Open a page with charts or status colors and confirm nothing reads oddly in dark mode.
  • Spot-check one client that has its own branding, if you have any. Those follow their own settings, not yours.

Going Back

Set Base Theme back to the legacy theme you were on. The portal returns on the next page load, your title bar color and logos are unchanged, and users who had a stored legacy preference get it back.

Two things do not come back, because they never applied to legacy themes in the first place: the dark-mode Home Page logo, and any dark-mode colors you set. Those values are kept — they just have no effect until you are on Fluent again.

Related

If you are still having trouble, we're here to help!

Submit a ticket here for assistance, and don't forget to check our status page to ensure there are no outages in your area.

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