We’re excited to announce the launch of core themes - a new approach to theming that’s now built directly into Discourse!
What are core themes?
Core themes are built-in, non-editable themes that ship with Discourse. They provide a reliable foundation for your site’s appearance and are maintained and updated with each Discourse release. You can’t directly edit or customise a core theme, which means they’ll always work as intended and stay up-to-date.
Foundation: Similar to what we previously called “Default.” We’ve renamed this to “Foundation” to avoid confusion, as your site’s default can now be any theme you choose. Like all core themes, Foundation is not directly editable.
Both of these themes are available in all new and existing Discourse sites from today, and will appear in your admin theme library.
If you had already customised the “Default” theme in your site, then you will still see it in your dashboard alongside Foundation and Horizon.
Customising your site
There are two ways of customising your site when using a core theme:
Use theme components
As always, you can continue to use theme components to add customisations and changes to your theme without editing the theme itself. This allows you to provide a consistent experience for your members and maintain granular control over each customisation.
Create a new theme
Simply click Install >Create New in the theme section of your admin. This will generate an editable theme that you can customise to your heart’s content, without affecting the core themes.
Core themes are here to make setup easier and keep your community looking sharp, while still giving you all the flexibility you need for advanced customisation.
Try out Horizon or Foundation today, and let us know what you think!
Wow! I just updated my personal site and the process was very seamless. I deleted my original Default theme, and I now only see the Horizon and Foundation themes in the list. Love it!
Because I personally sometimes still prefer Foundation, I’ve set them both to be user selectable, and they now appear in the theme switcher in the bottom left corner.
I also set all the new horizon color palettes to be selectable by users. They were not selectable already. Now they all also appear in the color switcher in the bottom left corner, on Horizon. Has anyone figured out yet to have the color switcher for Foundation or any other theme besides Horizon?
This change is definitely worth calling out. While the Foundation theme cannot be edited you can effectively create your own theme with the same starting point and then edit it to you heart’s content.
Ah yes, thanks for that. I tried it but it doesn’t support light/dark mode like the horizon palette chooser does. I also noticed that I can choose a different palette when on horizon and when I switch to foundation my chosen palette sticks.
Not a direct answer to your question @tobiaseigen but:
We are actively working on getting things to the point where color palettes natively support light/dark mode, and making some other related improvements to make it easier to configure a color palette for these built in themes.
We are aiming to land some of that stuff in the coming weeks.
Once we do it’ll be a good time to revisit what else to consider prioritizing with regards to color palettes.
What are core themes?
Meet Horizon and FoundationIf you had already customised the “Default” theme in your site, then you will still see it in your dashboard alongside Foundation and Horizon.
Customising your site
Try out Horizon or Foundation today, and let us know what you think!
