The side and top keys a module carries have decided nothing since the modules moved off their table: the two globals the foot reads by were never assigned, so every page rendered all four block positions. The reading is restored, and the grid stops holding a column it was no longer given.

Core changes:

1. The module block setting reaches the renderer (index.php):

2. $blocks and $blocks_c are assigned from $mconf beside active and view

   • setFoot() reads both by global and skips the sides a module switched off
   • They were declared in the global list of setFoot() and assigned in no file of the tree
   • A null global compares equal to the empty string, so the first branch of all four won always

3. The line lost in the migration read the columns blocks and blocks_c of the modules table

   • The keys are now side and top of $conf['modules'][$name], the values unchanged: 0 both, 1 first, 2 second, 3 neither
   • The four conditions of setFoot() are the ones 6.2 shipped and needed no edit
4. The home branch stays as it is, which is what 6.2 did: a random module never decided the blocks of the front page
5. The content grid follows the columns that exist (theme.css):

6. #container declares one column, and a side track only under :has() of the rail it belongs to

   • Left alone, right alone, both, neither - four rules, each naming its own template
   • The empty right track cost the content 400px of width and 24px of gutter on every page without blocks
   • #leftbar had no track at all: with left blocks the content would have landed in the sidebar column

7. The three rules sit inside @media (width > 900px) rather than at the top level

   • :has(#sidebar) carries the specificity of an id, which would outrank the narrow-screen reset
   • The two queries are complementary, so the stacked layout below 900px is untouched
8. The narrow-screen rule drops its grid-template-columns: it repeated the base, and 1fr is minmax(auto, 1fr)

Benefits:

• A setting the panel has been saving for years does what its label says
• A module without blocks reads across the full measure instead of against a 424px margin of nothing
• The layout answers the markup, so a left rail needs no second rule the day a left block is written

Technical notes:

• Behaviour: every module whose side or top is not 0 changes appearance, not only the one that was edited
• API: no token added or moved; both rules read --sl-layout-sidebar and --sl-layout-gutter as before
• Compatibility: :has() is already load-bearing in this theme; without it the page degrades to one column
• Gates: ui-audit clean per theme and global, counters identical to HEAD, ui:gates 193 green, phpunit 915 green
• Not run: the screenshot pair, for want of SLAED_UI_USER and SLAED_UI_PASS on the stand

The two photo bands of the front page gain a slow beam and a veil the dark mode alone puts on, the lower menu is laid out by icons at every width and closes the page on the same 50px edge the top bar opens it with, and every season and slider photograph now ships as WebP at a third of the weight.

Core changes:

1. Light beam on both photo bands (base.css, theme.css):

2. Four tokens carry the whole effect, all declared through light-dark() in the API block

   • --sl-band-bg is the veil: transparent in light, half-strength ink in dark
   • --sl-beam-width, --sl-beam-dur and --sl-beam-bg are the shaft, its pass and its light

3. The darkening lives in the alpha of the colour, not in an opacity layer

   • The opacity ladder carries no even half, and an alpha inside a colour is part of the colour

4. The beam travels upright at an even rate: eight seconds, three and a half of travel, four and a half at rest

   • It starts its own width left of the band and ends a window past it, which holds at any width
   • No literal outside the API block: calc() off the width token, 100vw, and the named layer tokens
5. Season photographs cover their band again (theme.css):

6. The ten season rules set the background with longhands instead of the background shorthand

   • The shorthand reset background-size, and with it the cover the base rules declare
   • On a narrow screen the band grew taller than the photo, which then hung as a strip
7. #head-content restates its own position, because its base rule centres on 50% 0
8. Season and slider art in WebP (images/, theme.css, index.php, main-slider.html):
9. Seventeen season files and four slider files replaced, 668 KB down to 248 KB
10. Every reference follows: seventeen url() in the theme, the LCP preload builder, the slider partial
11. ViewBridgeSmokeTest asserts the slider paths by name and moves with them
12. Footer menu as an icon grid (site-footer.html, base.css, theme.css, ui-contract.php):

13. Each destination carries its icon in the markup, never in an nth-child rule

    • A rule keyed on position drifts from the labels the first time a section is added
14. Three shapes of one idea: one row above 1200, four columns to 768, two columns below
15. --sl-fmenu-min-height is one thumb target and one row height, because it is one decision

16. --sl-fmenu-height reads --sl-topbar-height, so the page closes on the edge it opens with

    • Both are floors rather than fixed heights: below the wide step both blocks grow with content
17. The bar separator survives only in the single row, where a line break cannot strand it
18. Component names beam, fmenu declared in the contract
19. Prototype stands (demo/):
20. demo/ gains the hybrid of beam and season particles, and its beam variant matches what shipped

21. demo/footer/ is a new stand: fourteen treatments of the lower menu, each one <style> block

    • A variant renders inside an iframe of a chosen width, because the theme answers the viewport

Benefits:

• The dark mode stops asking white text to stand on a photograph shot for daylight
• A phone no longer meets a hanging separator, a 23px tap target or a stranded advertising line
• Four fewer JPEG kilobytes on every page view, and a third off the theme image payload
• Both bands and the footer are described by tokens, so the next theme repaints them from one block

Technical notes:

• Storage: seventeen season JPEG and four slider JPEG deleted; their WebP counterparts keep the pixel sizes
• API: --sl-sep-height stays declared and read, because a frozen API may gain a name and never lose one
• Compatibility: WebP needs no fallback at the theme baseline (Chrome 123, Safari 17.5, Firefox 120)
• Gates: ui-audit clean per theme and global, phpunit 915 tests green, ratchet re-stored

The panel settings window landed in 7e864723 with three rows built three ways, one of them posting without a token; the locale switch answered to any GET that carried newlang. This commit closes both, collapses the rows onto one builder, and follows the RSS feed the same way: declared where a reader looks for it, stable where it was random.

Core changes:

1. Settings window (core/admin.php, templates/admin/fragments/settings-row.html):

2. getAdminSettingsRow() takes the axis and returns the row

   • getAdminLanguagePick() and getAdminEditorPick() collapse into it
   • the panel stops drawing a mode row of its own, so templates/admin/fragments/

mode-switch.html and its fork entry in tools/ui-contract.php are gone

• the sl-mode class moves onto settings-row.html behind an is_mode flag, which

keeps --sl-mode-width and --sl-mode-height read and the frozen API intact

• hidden fields settle on fragments/hidden.html for all three rows

• the sidebar editor block leaves getAdminInfo(); the window is the only place the editor is offered, and the function loses three globals and gains a return type

• CSRF on the editor and the locale (admin/index.php, core/security.php, index.php):
• updateAdminEditor() refuses a request without checkAdminPost('changeeditor')

• setLang() only reads the cookie now; setLangChoice() does the writing

  • a token check cannot live in setLang(): it runs before the session, the database

and the parser exist, and every admin POST came back as the login page

• both op=newlang handlers call it and redirect, so the POST turns back into a GET

• scope newlang joins the token allowlist of checkDynamicMark(), because the site block sits on cacheable pages and needs getPageToken()

• Language producers (blocks/languages.php, templates/lite/fragments/lang-switch.html):
• the flags became submit buttons of one form, the select became a POST of the same
• the geo redirect writes the cookie directly instead of handing itself ?newlang=

• getAdminLanguageLinks() is gone: the panel renders with the admin theme, whose layout has no admin_langs, so the strip was computed on every load and discarded

• RSS feed (core/user.php, core/system.php):
• the site declares its own feed with <link rel="alternate"> in the head
• <atom:link rel="self"> and dc:creator replace an antispam@antispam.com placeholder
• ?go=rss without a name answers with the first module instead of a random one
• Route handler names (admin/index.php, core/system.php, modules/account/index.php):

• every handler carries a verb prefix now: updateAdminEditor, setAdminThemeMode, setAdminLanguage, deleteAdminSession, getAdminLoginForm, checkAdminLogin, addAdminAccount, and login_report becomes addLoginReport

• the op strings and token scopes they answer to are untouched
• Login journal (core/system.php):

• addLoginReport() reads the flag before the kind becomes a string

  • a non-empty string is true either way, so log_u was unreachable and log_a alone

decided both journals, which wrote user passwords the operator had switched off

1. Removals and site header (docs/, demo/, templates/lite/partials/site-header.html):
2. docs/SETTINGS-FIXES-2026.md and demo/ are deleted, no code referenced either

3. the RSS button leaves the header, browsers have not rendered a feed since 2018; the remaining tones shift back onto a contiguous position % 6 cycle

4. --sl-wordmark-img-width 145px -> 150px and a quoting fix in ThemeCreationTest.php ride along, both unrelated to the rest and included on request

Benefits:

• One builder and one fragment for a row instead of three constructions
• Two handlers that changed state without a token now refuse one that lacks it
• A locale change no longer happens because a prefetcher followed a link
• Readers find the feed without being handed its address

Technical notes:

• Breaking: log_u now means what it says. With log_a on and log_u off, user logins stop being written to log_user.log, and the attempted passwords with them

• Breaking: RSS <author> becomes <dc:creator>; a parser reading <author> loses the name
• Breaking: ?newlang= as a GET no longer switches the locale anywhere
• The site language switch returns to the referring page rather than to the home page
• No storage, schema or route changed: every op string and token scope is as it was

The site header stops cycling through the modes one press at a time and stands all three open on a rail; the panel stops spending its toolbar row on six flags and a toggle, and gathers the colour mode, the content editor and the language into one window opened from a single item. Both spend handlers that already existed: no new storage, no new op, and the editor keeps writing the administrator row it always wrote.

Core changes:

1. Colour mode control (core/system.php, templates/lite/fragments/mode-switch.html):

2. getThemeModeSwitch() returns the three modes with the one in force marked, instead of the next one to step to

   • the order is light, auto, dark, so the answer that follows the system sits between the two it chooses from
   • the knob rides over the cells and the active cell hands its icon to it, so nothing is drawn twice
3. the rail places its knob with :has() on the active cell, so no state attribute is written from PHP
4. Settings window of the panel (core/admin.php, templates/admin/fragments/window-settings.html):

5. getAdminSettingsWindow() builds one window from three rows, each posting to the handler that already owns it

   • the mode writes its cookie, the editor writes _admins.editor through changeeditor(), the language writes the session
   • Editor::getSelect() is reused as it stands, so the sidebar block and the window stay in step
6. getLanguageList() is the one list the flag strip of the plain panel and the language row both read
7. the toolbar keeps one item for the window and rules the row where the kind of destination changes
8. Theme components (templates//assets/css/.css, tools/ui-contract.php):
9. .sl-mode-rail, .sl-mode-cell and .sl-mode-knob replace the single .sl-mode-but of the site
10. .sl-set-row and .sl-set-item carry the window rows and the toolbar item; the component set is declared in the contract
11. a toolbar item may now hold a button as well as a link, which is what lets the window open from the menu row
12. the social row takes its hover ground from the category palette instead of eight hand-picked colours

Benefits:

• any mode is one press away on the site, where three presses were needed to come back to the system answer
• the panel toolbar returns to one line: 40px against the 70px the flags and the toggle wrapped it to
• one place for the three answers an administrator changes from any screen, with room for a fourth
• eight colour rules fall to one rotation the tree already spends on categories

Technical notes:

• no schema change and no new op: every row posts to an existing handler
• fragments/mode-switch.html diverges by theme on purpose, with the reason recorded in tools/ui-contract.php
• --sl-mode-width and --sl-mode-height stay declared in both themes, as a frozen API may not lose a name
• demo/ carries the stand the variants were chosen on; it links the shipped CSS and JS and ships no theme of its own

The etalon plan is finished, so its prose moves into the reference documentation and the plan file goes. What replaces the checklist nobody would remember is a pre-commit hook for the cheap gates and a two-word pair for the visual one. Four gates that read zero while checking nothing are closed, and the committed screenshot baseline is dropped because it cannot be stable on a stand whose own content moves.

Core changes:

1. Gates that no longer answer when their input vanishes:

2. tools/ui-contrast.json could be deleted and the contrast count still read zero

   • getContract() folds the registry in only if (is_file(...)), so a missing file

left nothing to check and ThemeContractTest stayed green

• ThemeContractTest now asserts the file exists and carries pairs for every theme

• node tools/ui-shots.mjs --check wrote a missing baseline image instead of failing

  • a check whose baseline is absent re-baselined itself against the tree it was

asked to judge and exited zero; it reports MISSING and exits non-zero now

• php tools/ui-audit.php --markup had no limit beside the count

  • markup.limit is 0, so the scan fails on the next hardcoded class, style or tag

• the screenshot rig captured a degraded set without credentials

  • --before and --after refuse to start without SLAED_UI_USER and SLAED_UI_PASS,

because a run without them skips every state that needs a session

1. Automation (tools/hooks/pre-commit, package.json):

2. the pre-commit hook runs the audit, the markup scan and the theme, template and parser tests on every commit carrying a file able to move a count

   • about twenty seconds, and nothing at all on a documentation commit
   • enable once per clone with npm run ui:hooks; SLAED_SKIP_GATES=1 skips one
   • when a commit touches theme CSS or a canon template it prints the two visual

commands, because no count can see a moved pixel

• npm run ui:before and npm run ui:after are the visual gate

  • ui:after empties the page and template caches, compares against the capture

`ui:before` took, regenerates the contrast registry when a base.css moved, reads
the counts and prints one verdict

• verified in both directions: no change gives PASS, a padding shift on a class the

page really carries gives eight DIFFs and FAIL

1. The screenshot baseline is no longer committed (tools/ui-baseline, .gitignore):

2. measured: a check against the committed set went red hours after capture on a tree whose frontend was byte-identical - 100% size changed at sm, md and lg on the front page and the forum list, 1.6% to 3.9% even at xl

3. the page height follows the content of the stand, and a mask cannot save a box whose height is what moves, so the reference is captured per change into a temp directory

4. 168 images and about 80 MB leave the working tree; the path is gitignored so a stray capture cannot put them back

5. A scratch theme stopped leaking its compiled templates (tests/Support/theme_scratch.php):

6. deleteScratchTheme() removed templates/scratch-* and left storage/cache/templates/scratch-* behind, so every phpunit run and every --newtheme leaked about half a megabyte under a name nothing can read again

7. Documentation (docs/, root):

8. docs/THEME-ETALON-2026.md is deleted; its contract, its gate table and its measured findings move into docs/TEMPLATES.md as three reference sections, without the batch narrative and without any superseded figure

9. docs/PARSER.md records that the parser owns no markup and needs a global $tpl

10. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md records that $tpl is created before $prs because the parser depends on it, not by coincidence

11. docs/EDITORS.md records that every driver mounts through fragments/editor-mount.html

12. CONTRIBUTING.md, UPGRADING.md and docs/TEMPLATES.md stop describing HTML leaving PHP as work in progress; it is done and a gate holds it

13. five files that pointed at the deleted plan now point at docs/TEMPLATES.md

Benefits:

• the cheap gates need nothing remembered: they run on commit or refuse it
• a gate whose input is missing now fails instead of reporting a clean zero
• the working tree drops from about 145 MB to 65 MB

Technical notes:

• .git is unchanged in size: the baseline blobs stay in history and any image can be recovered with git show b115eaa0:tools/ui-baseline/<name>.png

• the hook needs core.hooksPath pointed at tools/hooks, which npm run ui:hooks does

• the full 168-image walk has not been run under the new --before/--after flags; the cycle was verified with --only=voting, and the contrast branch of ui:after has not executed because no palette moved in that test

• no breaking change: 915 tests pass, phpstan is clean, every ratcheted count holds