FKB Pro v2 - What’s new?
A little late with the announcement - v2 was released about two weeks ago - but hey, better late than never. 
FKB Pro v2 is a fairly substantial update under the hood. While the overall look and feel remains familiar, quite a few parts of the theme have been redesigned, optimized, and cleaned up.
Improved desktop layout
The desktop topic list now uses a more flexible layout that works much better with the Discourse sidebar and FKB Pro’s own panel.
The layout adapts automatically as the available space changes, with dedicated breakpoints for smaller screens and mobile devices.
Better responsive behavior
A lot of work went into handling narrow layouts and overflowing content.
Long topic titles, usernames, tags, and other content are now handled much more reliably instead of being able to push the layout beyond its available width.
Mobile layouts were also adjusted to work with the actual container width rather than relying on viewport-based sizing.
Topic list performance
The topic list received some performance optimizations as well.
Off-screen topic cards can now be skipped by the browser when appropriate, while topic images and their containers use better containment rules.
This should be especially useful on longer topic lists.
Improved FKB Panel caching
The FKB Panel now uses user-specific, versioned cache keys.
Instead of sharing generic cache entries, user data is stored against the current Discourse user, which prevents cached information from leaking between accounts when switching users in the same browser.
The cache also now handles expiration and invalid entries more reliably.
Faster panel loading
User summary and card data are now requested in parallel instead of waiting for one request to finish before starting the next.
There is also additional protection against outdated requests overwriting data after the active user has changed.
New panel state management
The FKB Panel’s show/hide state has been moved into a dedicated state service.
This makes the behavior more predictable and easier to maintain, while also improving the panel toggle itself with:
-
proper
aria-expandedstate -
descriptive labels
-
dynamic icons
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persistent show/hide state
Accessibility improvements
Several interactive elements received better accessibility support, particularly around the FKB Panel controls.
The panel toggle now exposes its state correctly to assistive technologies and provides more useful labels and titles.
Mobile improvements
Various mobile layouts were cleaned up and made more robust, including topic lists, categories, private messages, user pages, groups, and topics.
The goal was to make FKB Pro behave more naturally inside Discourse’s responsive layout rather than fighting against it.
More modular code
A large part of the update was also about making the codebase easier to maintain.
The FKB Panel has been split into smaller components for things such as user information, statistics, badges, and visitors.
The topic list cards have also been reorganized into separate header, body, meta, and list-section components.
This doesn’t necessarily change what users see, but it makes future development considerably easier.
In short
FKB Pro v2 isn’t just a visual update. It’s a fairly significant rewrite of several parts of the theme, with a focus on better responsive behavior, performance, caching, accessibility, and maintainability.
Thanks to everyone using FKB Pro and reporting issues or suggesting improvements. 