Hey guys, I did a simple theme that uses the new sidebar. It’s a modern play on old-school bulletin boards. It also aims to be dead simple to use:
I’ve only worked on desktop styles so far. I also don’t plan to publish the theme before the sidebar is out of it’s experimental state. Otherwise styles break all the time.
But it would be great to get some feedback already while it’s in the works. If you feel like, you could also sign up, play around and post on the live instance 
It’s very clean. Many of my users do not appreciate the "modern"ness of discourse so I thought about doing a more classical looking theme like this. I guess my next recommendation if you want to really embrace the old-school look is to scale up the avatar size on posts and adjust their position (xenforo shown as example)
Might be a decent amount of work since you’ll probably have to adjust the horizontal positions of everything to accommodate the extra width. Just speaking out loud here, obviously it’s up to you on how you want the theme to look. But this is something I will eventually experiment with myself
Love the simplicity, personally I’d want it to be even more simple and eliminate the breadcrumb nav entirely (but I could also see how that might be too much).
I’d also prioritize categories/tags above users/about/faq (assuming categories/tags would be used more often).
Yes, it’s also meant more as a template offering the structural layout but no custom styles yet. So when used on an actual instance I’d imagine a less clean look.
I want to keep it all simple with this one. But curious to see that! From my experience re-designing the topic stream you’re up for some CSS acrobatics to adjust the look in that direction. Or would you try using a custom template?
Thanks for the feedback, Kris! My original idea was having a breadcrumb indicator on every page. But yes, I think I’ll rather try to make it quite radically simple 
Maybe I’ll go all the way for a pinboard style and only offer tags for content structure. Then drop categories or recast them for group-restricted content only.
I’d definitely be interested in seeing that! I had started a simple tag-only theme last year but never ended up releasing it because it had a few issues (which I think the sidebar now solves!)
Ah, that’s unfortunate. I’m in love with the modifications you’ve made with the sidebar! 
Is this theme available somewhere?
yes, I shared it recently:
TY, but it looks almost the same as my current theme. Doesn’t really look like the “Community” theme you showed earlier.
I’m dying for a BBS style theme that looks like vBulletin or Xenforo.
Well it’s a 100% the same theme shared here and on the other topic. Not sure what look you are after, but it if you want the setup with separate panels you need to combine it with the Showcase component, as explained on the theme topic.
I imported it to my forum. Big fan, nice work.
Anything you can do to fix this on mobile? Theme is just fine on web and mobile if this is fixed. See the alignment of the new topic button.
Shouldn’t it be on the far right?
Thanks for the feedback!
As far as I can see there’s no code on the theme that would change default behavior here. Posted a brief report in bugs: Navigation controls align left for mobile admin view
