We Want Your Input | Union Portal

As you may of noticed (it's kind of hard to miss), I have enabled the portal on the forums and done some work with it. Now, we would like your input on if we should even have a portal, and if so what would you like to see on it. I'd also like comments on what I've done so far concerning in particular the "Active Topics" feed and the search bar, since these I added as custom widgets that are not part of the default widgets the forums provide. I found the visual aspects of the existing search and recent topics widgets visually unappealing, but I'd love to know what you think.