User blog comment:Sannse/Your First Look at the New Wikia/@comment-129646-20100824101616/@comment-8-20100824173405

Cavalier One, I hope you will sign up for the Beta testing, I think you would be an ideal person to look at the new design in detail. That will also answer a lot of your questions above.

A couple of points: individual themes and customization are definitely still possible and encouraged, we agree that’s an important part of your wiki. And we will certainly be doing all we can to help wikis move to the new look.

Comments are currently on a few wikis (including new English wikis), and we had to choose one version or the other for the image above. Talk pages will still work with the new design, as will infoboxes, templates and the table of contents.

You bring up a lot of questions about the decisions on what links and features are most visible - that's a bigger question than I can answer in a comment, but we do have blog posts coming that look at a lot of these features in detail - including the reasoning behind their positioning.