The new forums look very promising. Can't wait for them to go live and see them in action. :)
A couple of suggestions/questions:
I really do like these forums, its much easier to use and hopefully it will attract the rest of the community and start a lively and useful forum.
Very nice
To follow up on this, we added the Edit Profile link and set the site title (top & center) to link back to the forums home. But you'll have to stick with using their emoticon markup for those.