Thank you for asking @Canapin –
This Theme Component is part of a suite of components I’ve started making for my own project (and in order to provide for the community, in case others might want it).
The project is to provide a more surgical approach to site customization, using a subtractive (rather than the more conventional additive) process.
You see, I’ve developed themes and provided support for the Ghost CMS community in the Developers’ Forum there for several years.
That community uses Discourse for it’s development and support platform, and that is how I became familiar with Discourse.
The elegant simplicity of Ghost as a blogging and (more recently) a full-blown publishing platform was a breath of fresh air for me after years of developing sites in Drupal and Wordpress.
Over time I wanted more and more functionality out of Ghost, and the platform itself and the friendly community there made that simple for me, in large part because of the Discourse forum there.
As I became more proficient at using Discourse in the Ghost community, I sort of fell in love with it, and over the last couple years I’ve sort of switched my daily online “home base” over here to Discourse. Mainly because I sort of outgrew the Ghost platform as a theme developer, and wanted more “out-of-the-box” functionality readily available to me “under the hood”. Also, the community there is much smaller, and evolution is naturally slower and more cumbersome.
Ghost’s features and interfaces are, by design, very minimal and highly focused in scope, and relatively limited in access through it’s provided user and admin interfaces. If I want or need to extend the features beyond what is provided “out-of-the-box”, I need to build it myself (largely without community support) and then figure out how to plug it in as an external component. For me, the learning curves in this approach became not worth it.
This is where Discourse came into stark contrast for me. I experience Discourse, as a platform tool set, on the opposite side of the spectrum from Ghost. It is more mature, with a larger community that moves faster and more efficiently.
It seems that Discourse already has, built in “out-of-the-box” all of the features that I came to want or to need in Ghost (as well as what my clients are increasingly asking for), along with an even more awesome community!
Discourse has matured so far beyond a forum software and, while the core forum functionality is absolutely far and away the best-in-class, I see Discourse as a toolbox (actually more like a Home Depot) for building customized platforms and applications and new types of online social spaces.
I’ve always pushed and pulled and stretched the various platforms I’ve use in site-building. As an insatiable daily learner and happy nOObish warrior, I seek to learn and master and conquer. It is what gets me up every morning and brings me joy throughout each day.
In this regard, I feel so many kindred spirits in this community, as I do in all open-source communities.
Wait, what was your original question?
Oh yeah…
Lately I’ve been experimenting with building a simplified blogging platform using Discourse. I was going to build it as it’s own Theme, and I think I still will. But I’ve decided to break up the work into smaller bites (Theme Components) which could also be selectively applied to any existing themes.
I think a great deal of this can be accomplished by simply, selectively subtracting things (through CSS-hiding Theme Components, and possibly other methods I have yet to learn.)
So, in answer to your question, this Theme Component is one example of a Theme Component in that larger suite I’ve begun working on.
If you could check it out and match this one up it would be brilliant. 
