Hi, thank you very much!
To ease maintainability of our theme we chose not to overwrite a single Discourse template. We did however write a ton of CSS as a result. Besides the custom header we’ve developed two Discourse plugins:
- https://github.com/danskdynamit/discourse-hot-topics (thanks to @joebuhlig)
- https://github.com/danskdynamit/discourse-links-category (thanks to @fantasticfears)
The hot-topics plugin adds the like button to each topic on the homepage. It also adds a /hot route that sorts topics favoring total views and likes (including comments) while factoring in when the topic was posted. Much like Hacker news. See Discourse Hot Topics
The links-category plugin allows you to have a “Links” category in Discourse that changes the main textarea to an input where you can enter a URL. Again, much liker Hacker News.
Both are working great for us and while they’re still in development we hope the community will find them useful!