How do I go about making a very customized theme?

[SinisterSpatula]

Thanks I have a ton of reading to do. Hopefully it’ll all start to make sense. I found a really relevant topic:

Overriding Discourse templates from a Theme or Plugin

Ideally, when customizing Discourse via themes/plugins, you should use CSS, the JavaScript Plugin API, or plugin outlets. If none of these work for your use-case, feel free to open a PR to Discourse core or start a dev topic here on Meta. We’re always happy to discuss adding new outlets/APIs to make customization easier. If you’ve exhausted all other options, you may need to resort to template overrides. This technique allows you to override the entire template of any Ember Component or Route f…

And then, just sharing some links/notes for others that might be in the same boat:

HTML templates are in https://github.com/discourse/discourse/tree/main/app/assets/javascripts/discourse/app/templates

Beginners Guide to Themes:

Beginner's guide to using Discourse Themes

This is a crash course in Discourse theme basics. The target audience is everyone who is not familiar with Discourse themes. If you’ve already used Discourse theme / theme components, this guide is probably not something you need to read. What are themes and theme components? A theme or theme component is a set of files packaged together designed to either modify Discourse visually or to add new features. Let’s start with themes. Themes In general, themes are not supposed to be compatible …

Developers Guide to Themes:

Beginner's guide to developing Discourse Themes

So, you want to create Discourse themes? Not sure where to start? Or maybe you have created Discourse themes before, but want to learn how to do even more cool things. Well, you’ve come to the right place Developer’s guide to Discourse Themes Subjects include a general overview of Discourse themes, creating and sharing Discourse themes, theme development examples, searching for and finding information / examples in the Discourse repository, and best practices. Prerequisites: …

Designers Guide to Themes:

Designer's Guide to getting started with themes in Discourse

This is possible, and the method I would reccomend. The only thing you need to be aware of is that these changes will be live on the forum as you make every change. What I do is set the theme to be user selectable, and change my personal user preference to that theme, while keeping the default theme the choice for all other users. This lets only you see any issues that may arise during theming.

Creating a Theme-Component:

Theme Developer Quick Reference Guide

As themes grow more powerful, there’s more to remember about how they work. We have loads of detailed documentation under #howto / #themes, but if you just need something to jog your memory, this guide may help. General Resources Beginner’s guide Designer’s guide Developer’s guide Theme Creator Theme CLI Theme Directory Component Directory Theme Modifiers File/Folder Structure…

Theme Component to reveal plugin outlet locations (places to inject new html/script/styles):

GitHub - communiteq/plugin-outlets-theme-component

Plug-in Development:

Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 1 - Create a basic plugin

Building a plugin in Discourse can be really simple, once you learn a couple of quirks. The goal of this post is to create a skeleton plugin and introduce you to the basics. Your development environment Make sure you have a development environment of Discourse running on your computer. I recommend you use the appropriate setup guide and come back when you’re done. plugin.rb Use GitHub - discourse/discourse-plugin-skeleton: Template for Discourse plugins to create a complete discourse…

Learn to start building stuff:

Learn how to start building stuff for Discourse if you're newbie (like myself)

There are a few ‘how to start’ guides for working with Discourse already and a wealth of useful info on meta, but I thought it might help to give an insight to the mental processes of starting from little, if any, prior coding experience to building substantial Discourse plugins. Discourse is written by experienced developers and has a large codebase. This can feel intimidating. This intimidation factor can be a significant barrier for novice developers. This is a kind of ‘psychological primer’…

Install Discourse on Ubuntu/Debian for Development:

Install Discourse on Ubuntu or Debian for Development

This guide covers installation instructions in a development environment. For a production guide see: Install Discourse in production with the official, supported instructions So you want to set up Discourse on Ubuntu or Debian to hack on and develop with? We’ll assume that you work locally and don’t have Ruby/Rails/Postgres/Redis installed on your Ubuntu or Debian system. Let’s begin! Requirements We suggest having at least 4 GB RAM and 2 CPU cores. Current compatibility: …

What I really want to modify is the “topic-list” or homepage

• This theme has already created the desired topic-list format:

Sam's Simple Theme

Summary Sam’s Simple Theme creates a “minimal” topic list design Preview Preview on theme-creator.discourse.org Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-simple-theme New to Discourse Themes? Beginner’s guide to using Discourse Themes Install this theme I have been thinking about this a lot, and decided to take a shot at a “minimal” front page customisation. To select this theme here on Meta head to y…

• Author Name + Avatar:

Author name plus avatar or Show Original Poster Avatars

• Groups of Categories:

Category Groups

Summary Category Groups allows you to assign categories to groups, which are then used to sort and collapse categories on the categories page. Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-category-groups-component New to Discourse Themes? Beginner’s guide to using Discourse Themes Install this theme component [category groups example] Important things to note: This only works with the site setting desktop…

• Featured category icons:

Featured Categories Header

This theme component adds a row of featured categories as a header banner. It just shows logos and names, so you should have a logo on each category you want to feature: [Screenshot from 2021-09-16 22-59-16] You can pick the categories in the component settings. Also added a few style declarations to change the look right there: [Screenshot from 2021-09-16 23-40-32] So it’s easy to get some different basic styles: [Screenshot from 2021-09-16 22-58-53] To do more customization, the classe…

Can also try the online theme editor:

Theme Creator

Extra’s:
• Single Sign On? SSO
Setup DiscourseConnect - Official Single-Sign-On for Discourse (sso)
• Discord Bot
Discord Bot Construction Kit 🤖