How difficult would it be to make the Discourse UI more like Flarum?

subtenko · 20.Март.2018 18:43:45

Scale of 1-10 how difficult would it be? Hopefully this question doesn’t peeve anyone but Im torn between the two. Flarum has a really clean interface:

Topic list is centered with no lines in between, yet its still easy to read.
Search bar is all in the same sticky header and not a ‘nook’
Category markers look better, not just a 4x4 square.

Hmm… thats about it I think… Does this make sense? Sorry if this is posted to the wrong section.

Sidenote info: Im currently testing out both software even though having a hard time putting discourse on the same server vs my other 1 click install server. At least I have this working because for some reason I get a blank page when finalizing the flarum install. Really if Discourse had the same Flarum UI and features discourse currently has it be a much easier pick

notriddle · 20.Март.2018 19:06:07

angus · 21.Март.2018 08:49:09

The answer is that it would be easy.

Discourse has a Theming system (see themes tag) that makes the kind of changes you’re talking about just a matter of adding the right CSS rules.

You can add CSS either directly in the “Site Customisations” Admin Panel UI, or on your local machine in your editor of choice via the CLI, with the ability to preview changes instantly on your site.

If you’re not a coder, you can hire one in the marketplace.

As has already been mentioned, you can use my header search theme component for the header search part of your list.

alehandrof · 21.Март.2018 10:10:21

I like the Flarum homepage as shown in the second screenshot! Not sure how doable that would be with CSS given that the categories in Discourse are a dropdown. But I like the idea of having the categories as permanent sidebar on the left hand side (while browsing topics).

BlackKnob · 22.Март.2018 00:28:10

It’s a nice looking design, but only when you are at the top of the page. Then the color banner disappears and you are left with just the white main header.
If you want to have a color header, then the topic banner won’t look as sexy. (would look like having two headers).
Also, the categories bullet list in Flarum doesn’t show descriptions. Did you try Material Design Stock Theme for Discourse?

notriddle · 22.Март.2018 00:54:01

It could be done with a theme component, though it would require some javascript.

erlend_sh · 02.Апрель.2018 03:17:26

I just remembered there’s some prior art on this by @bts here:

Once there’s a published theme available for this it’d be great if the two of you could compare notes and ideally end up with a single codebase.

bts · 02.Апрель.2018 13:57:18

Thanks @erlend_sh good catch! Didn’t see this topic yet. Yes we spent some time last year on exactly this, trying to get something close to the Flarum-style headers. This is what it looks like on our site:

And here’s the gist of the HTML / CSS we came up with for this—

CSS:
(This is all in “common” — besides this there are also a few minor margin / padding tweaks for desktop vs. mobile I didn’t include below.)

/* GENERAL */

body {
    overflow-x: hidden;
}

.custom-cat-header {
	display: block;
	margin-left: -9999px!important;
	padding-left: 9999px!important;
	margin-right: -9999px!important;
	padding-right: 9999px!important;
	text-align: center;
	margin-top: -18px;
}

.custom-cat-header p {
    color: #dddddd;
}

.custom-cat-header h1 {
    display: inline-block;
    margin-top: 20px;
    color: #dddddd;
    background-color: #222222;
    border-radius: 5px;
    width: inherit;
}

/* ALL CATEGORIES */
.custom-cat-header-all-categories {display: none;}
body.navigation-categories .custom-cat-header-all-categories, body.navigation-topics .custom-cat-header-all-categories {
    display: block; 
    background-color: #b1880b;
}
.custom-cat-header-all-categories h1 {color: #d4a411;}

/* PLAYING TECHNIQUE */
.custom-cat-header-playing-technique {display: none;}
body.category-playing-technique .custom-cat-header-playing-technique {
    display: block; 
    background-color: #9c2116;
}
.custom-cat-header-playing-technique h1 {color: #d62e1f;}
body.category-playing-technique .custom-cat-header-all-categories {display: none;}

/* repeat for all other categories! */

HTML (in “After Header” section):

<!-- ALL CATEGORIES -->
<div class="custom-cat-header custom-cat-header-all-categories">
    <a href="https://forum.troygrady.com/"><h1>All Categories</h1></a>
    <p>Welcome to the Cracking the Code Forum!</p>
</div>

<!-- PLAYING TECHNIQUE -->
<div class="custom-cat-header custom-cat-header-playing-technique">
    <a href="https://forum.troygrady.com/c/playing-technique"><h1>Playing Technique</h1></a>
    <p>Pickslanting, chunking, fretting, motion mechanics — ask your technical questions here.</p>
</div>

<!-- repeat for all other categories! -->

This is pretty visually polished…but also very custom / hacky with lots of repetitive manual edits. Easy enough for our ~dozen categories, but for greater flexibility I could see this being cool as a simple plugin that would:

automatically grab and insert the category descriptions
automatically handle color calculations (ours are similar to category colors but we manually made the header bg color a bit darker and the h1 “pill” text color a bit lighter for better contrast / readability).

I have no experience making plugins. But for now a theme component combining what @lll and I have come up with sounds like a good next step!

subtenko · 02.Апрель.2018 17:39:50

Hey @lll I didnt see your reply before, and I didn’t test yours out before seeing bts’s version but I like that you did Javascript, leads to more connection when editing/change styles. It would be awesome if this was a theme component, idk how to do that yet but here’s what I did with bts’ code:

<!-- After Header section -->

<!-- PLAYING TECHNIQUE -->
<div class="custom-cat-header custom-cat-header-nites-cinema">
    <a href="https://forum.troygrady.com/c/playing-technique"><h1>Playing Technique</h1></a>
    <p>Pickslanting, chunking, fretting, motion mechanics — ask your technical questions here.</p>
    <img src="https://d11a6trkgmumsb.cloudfront.net/original/3X/c/b/cb4bec8901221d4a646e45e1fa03db3a65e17f59.png">
</div>

I added that img src things as a random idea I had after I was done with doing the below edit. Obviously you gotta make another style rule to make sure the img/icon fits in the header (I did it via inspect elements), the main thing I was going for:

/* In common CSS */

/* PLAYING TECHNIQUE */
.custom-cat-header-nites-cinema {display: none;}
body.category-nites-cinema  .custom-cat-header-nites-cinema {
    display: block; 
    background: url('http://wallpaperscraft.com/image/starry_sky_tree_milky_way_radiance_120245_602x339.jpg') 0px -300px fixed no-repeat;}
.custom-cat-header-playing-technique h1 {color: #d62e1f;}
body.category-playing-technique .custom-cat-header-all-categories {display: none;}

/* repeat for all other categories! */

This is what I did on my old forum version of bbpress which was a edit of a clone to make it look like flarum, Reference: https://github.com/Sceko/bbFlarum

but I added in background image and fixed position to make it look cool

The result:

What can be done with a theme component if you add in my idea:

javascript to pull in icon banner (if people like that) from category image or wherever
javascript pulling in background img sources vs manually entering
A commentedout CSS section for people who wanna do my edit, explaining what it does.

Thoughts? Again, thanks for the input both of you, and everyone in this topic

McBlu · 02.Апрель.2018 18:09:15

I am definitely interested in implementing this once it gets sorted. Thumbs up, guys.

subtenko · 02.Апрель.2018 19:56:34

So theres gonna be a bit of redundancy if you choose to have category image and description turned on, unless you wanna have different stuff in the header or just a background. Just gonna have to decide and finagle with the theme because I dont think category image and description is a themeable thing, its a build it setting for discourse.

Still awesome to have these options. All im gonna have is 2 main themes for my forums. Sometimes i get in an indecisive/perfectionist loop

subtenko · 03.Апрель.2018 16:09:41

Yea the example you posted and the one I edited, it shows up on 2 of those locations (for category banner)

Off the top of your head is there a way to just show it on one of those pages (ie. Only on topic pages?[ The actual posts inside the category] ) vss CSS? If not do you think JavaScript could do it?

Well my edit I was gonna post is this: (For disabling the category description and logo only in the category page and nowhere else)

.category-heading {
clear: both;
display: none;
}

Then @awesomerobot comes along and totally 1ups me,lol. Yea dude that looks way better than the manual edits I was gonna do

awesomerobot · 03.Апрель.2018 17:31:14

I put together a rough theme component for this so you don’t have to create a bunch of redundant markup to show/hide… This will pull the appropriate category name, description, and background/text colors when you’re on a category list page.

My JS is hacked up from a few different posts on Meta, so definitely please improve it if you can.

Put this in common/header

<script type="text/discourse-plugin" version="0.8">
    const container = Discourse.__container__;    
    const { h } = require('virtual-dom');
   
    api.createWidget('category-header-widget', {
        tagName: 'span', 
        html(attrs, state) {
        
        const path = window.location.pathname;
        let category;
          
        const controller = container.lookup('controller:navigation/category');
        category = controller.get("category");
        
        if(/^\/c\//.test(path)) {
            $("body").addClass("category-header");            
            return h('div.category-title-header', {
                "attributes" : {
                    "style" : "background-color: #" + category.color + "; color: #" + category.text_color + ";"
                }

            }, h('div.category-title-contents', [
                    h('h1', category.name),   
                    h('p', category.description_text)          
                ])
            );
            } else {
                $("body").removeClass("category-header");
            }   
        }      
    }),

    api.decorateWidget('category-header-widget:after', helper => {
        helper.widget.appEvents.on('page:changed', () => {
            helper.widget.scheduleRerender();
        });
    });

</script> 
  
<script type='text/x-handlebars' data-template-name='/connectors/below-site-header/category-header-widget'>
    {{mount-widget widget="category-header-widget"}}
</script>

This is common/CSS

.category-title-header {
  padding-top: 60px;
  display: flex;
  text-align: center;
  width: 100%;
  justify-content: center;
  .category-title-contents {
    max-width: 500px;
    padding: 40px 0;
  }
}
.category-header {
 #main-outlet {
     padding-top: 20px;
 }
}

You can also target specific category headers with additional custom CSS by using this structure:

body.category-example {
    .category-title-header {
        background: url(example.jpg);
    }
}

With some time this could definitely be improved to support tags & topic titles!

Update: Made some refinements and put this in a repo as a theme component

BlackKnob · 03.Апрель.2018 18:18:39

This already works great @awesomerobot!
Could you please add an “All Categories” banner as well?

robotnjik · 08.Апрель.2018 11:27:10

Nice work! Anyone having this live on their Discourse? I would like to check it out how looks like…

Francois_Douville · 20.Апрель.2018 18:34:30

I add this in my forum and it’s perfect! A little thing is that it takes only the first lines of the description of the categories and don’t show links.

This is my text with links :

We only see the first two lines (and without links)

oshyan · 16.Июль.2021 20:28:49

Жаль, что здесь мало обсуждается о других, возможно, приятных аспектах Flarum. Flarum наконец-то перешёл на версию 1.0. И хотя я по-прежнему считаю, что Discourse превосходит его по многим параметрам, мне тоже нравятся некоторые элементы дизайна/интерфейса Flarum. Поэтому надеюсь, что если другие тоже скучают по эстетике, похожей на Flarum, они тоже присоединятся к обсуждению здесь, и, возможно, нам наконец удастся создать тему (к сожалению, у меня нет необходимых навыков, но я мог бы внести финансовый вклад в коллективную работу над этим, если будет интерес).

На данный момент, чтобы начать решать задачи, помимо заголовка, я считаю, что боковую панель можно в основном воспроизвести с помощью:

Хотя она не поддерживает теги. Альтернатива:

Проблема в том, что оба решения, похоже, нуждаются в обновлении, поддержке или рефакторинге.

Одна функция или подход к дизайну, которые, насколько мне известно, полностью отсутствуют в Discourse, — это более очевидная текстовая область для «ответа», которая, на мой взгляд, является приятной альтернативой кнопке «Ответить»:

Обратите внимание, что это не просто, возможно, более «лёгкий» или выглядящий более «бесшовным» подход к ответу. Добавление уже присутствующего изображения аватара — это интересная деталь, которая, на мой личный взгляд, стимулирует взаимодействие, поскольку тонко создаёт ощущение, будто вы уже вовлечены.

Фактически, я считаю, что это, вероятно, достаточно хорошая идея, чтобы заслужить отдельный запрос на новую функцию…

merefield · 16.Июль.2021 21:24:49

Также обратите внимание: Layouts Plugin

oshyan · 16.Июль.2021 22:14:40

О да, хорошее замечание! Я попробую как можно скорее.

codinghorror · 19.Июль.2021 22:18:11

Верно; ответ как отдельное действие, которое нужно явно инициировать, а не как предзаполненное поле ввода, — это сознательный элемент дизайна с самых первых дней существования Discourse. Мы хотим поощрять чтение, а не немедленные ответы потому что «кто-то не прав в интернете». Я считаю, что многие современные проблемы в интернете можно проследить до того, что слишком многие люди реагируют слишком быстро, не уделяя достаточно времени размышлениям.

Внедрение функции чата также должно снять напряжение с импульса «я должен немедленно ответить первой пришедшей в голову эмоцией» и направить его более уместным образом.

Если вам нужна боковая панель, это функция Teams.

Тема		Ответов	Просм.
Which is Better? Discourse or Flarum? Community Building	31	37270	16.08.2021
Possible to emulate old-style PHPBB like design? UX	29	2957	13.11.2018
Theme like meta.discourse.org (was PAID) Support unsupported-install	16	835	08.12.2022
A reddit-ish theme for Discourse Theme	114	15085	24.04.2026
Discourse theme to look like Skool Marketplace	16	507	07.11.2024

How difficult would it be to make the Discourse UI more like Flarum?

Связанные темы