How to build a Discourse theme similar to forum.cfx.re?

[Sora_Papa]

Hi everyone,

I’m building a Vietnamese community forum using Discourse. I’ve found the layout and style of https://forum.cfx.re very clean, well-structured, and user-friendly.

I’d like to ask for your guidance on how to create a similar layout and theme.

Specifically, I’m trying to achieve:

1. A homepage layout with categories displayed at the top and latest topics shown below (like categories_and_latest_topics).
2. Clean category boxes with icons, colors, and brief descriptions – like on forum.cfx.re.
3. A neat, minimalist design with a lot of white space, similar font styling, and smooth hover effects.
4. Sidebar or navigation similar to that site (if it’s a plugin or component?).
5. Recommendations on what theme components or CSS customization would be needed to achieve this look.

So far I’ve tried:

• Setting desktop category page style to categories_and_latest_topics
• Installing discourse-category-icons, category-banners, and custom-layouts

But I feel like the overall polish and layout spacing is still different.

Could you please point me in the right direction? Or is there a public theme repository or a theme export for forum.cfx.re?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Bas (Bas van Leeuwen)]

@Sora_Papa

Or is there a public theme repository

You’re in luck!

Theme

[Moin]

@Bas

You’re in luck!

Theme - Discourse Meta

But I don’t think you will find the theme bundled with all the customizations of https://forum.cfx.re/ in that category.

@Sora_Papa

Installing discourse-category-icons

Maybe they use the category logo in the category’s settings. Did you try that?

I think Category List with Banners was inspired by forum.cfx.re. So you may be interested in that. But apart from that, no components come to my mind.