Can you make Discourse look like medium.com?

As someone new to Medium, I’m trying to understand how much you can customize the look and feel of a forum. I’m wondering if there’s a way to make your forum look more like a news site. Or make it seem to your users like they are writing a blog post.

To be more specific, can you make your forum mimic the look and feel of medium.com?

The home page of medium is laid out more like a news site–with articles (in the Discourse case, I guess they would be topics) in different places to be visually appealing.

A lot of the articles also have an image attached to it on the home page for visual appeal. Using Discourse, this could happen maybe if, for example, I as the forum owner would give each category an image, and that image would appear next to the topic when posted.

If you then go to write a post on medium.com, the post automatically defaults to a clean, distraction-free form that basically takes over the page.

Is there a way to make a discourse forum like this, especially the home page look and feel?

Yes, you can, but you’ll need heavy customised discourse theme.

Checkout the guide for theme development: Developer’s guide to Discourse Themes

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Thanks. Are there pre-existing plugins/themes that would help?

You might look at the theme category? Atlas, a simple blog-styled theme with an optional sidebar

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Cool. Thanks. I’ll take a look.