Letting users select different themes

Feature
1

Continuing the discussion from What about an easier styling/theming system?:

Will your theming system support showing different themes for different users? I’m not talking about completely different themes with HTML and JS changes. But it occurred to me that it could be rather nice to let users pick between a Light vs a Dark theme on our forum, provided we’ve made our theme to support that feature of course, because that shouldn’t be a given for every Discourse theme.

Example from Tweetdeck:

screen-shot-2012-10-10-at-18-38-08.png965×679 124 KB

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2

Yes! we’re totally planning on a simple dark/light switch along with a few other pre-defined color combinations to choose from. Near future!

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Perfect. The near future is my all-time favorite place.

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4

Hello, has there been an update on this? I just started using Discourse and already had this request from several users.

5

There is no support for per user theming and no plans for it. You may want to point your users to Stylish extension for their browser.

https://userstyles.org

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So what still holds true for what @awesomerobot was referring to when he said this?

Strictly the theme customiser, without per-user switching? Well then, I hope we can make it possible through plugins somehow. Thanks for the Stylish tip, could be useful in the meantime.

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7

There is a work-around for this now:

I have both links bookmarked so I can go back and forth between them easily here on meta. You could do something similar with links in a custom header.

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Minor caveat, there is no way at the moment to apply a “custom style” on top of a “base style” so you lose on the base customisations (like the feature and bug tabs at the moment)

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I definitely think letting users choose from a couple or so different themes is helpful. Some like lighter designs, some like darker designs.

If the Admins create a few theme options it would be good to be able to make it where users could have an option in their preferences to switch between the configured themes.

Are there any plans currently to have something like this implemented?

2 Likes
10

Check out this post for a customization that has been used in the wild, and also sam’s later comment:

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11

Easy enough to do, works for now.

16

Continuing the discussion from Coming soon to Meta :new_moon: DARKNESS :new_moon::

No, that was a mockup of a per-user theme selector, located under preferences (in fact, the mockup was based off of a “custom field” on a VM that I installed discourse on a while back). I still think that a built-in per-user theme would be better than installing an extension (+ the user doesn’t have to know how to write CSS).

BTW, when I quoted my post, discourse didn’t automatically copy images.

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Per user theme selection is not something we have scheduled or planned.

18

If anyone wants to work on it as a community PR that is fine.

6 Likes
19

Just keep in mind we need preview style function working in admin before any of this

1 Like
21

[quote=“sam, post:4, topic:32450, full:true”]
Just keep in mind we need preview style function working in admin before any of this
[/quote]Seems to me that adding user selectable pre-defined themes that have restricted visibility (by TL or group, for instance) would be an easy way for an admin to preview a new style. :smile:

I wish I could take credit for this brilliant idea, but it is straight out of vBulletin.

The theme picker could be shown to a user who has the ability to pick themes (by TL?) and there’s more than one that he is able to pick given his credentials. So an admin could define and save a new theme but only permit it to the admin group, and then select it in the front end and give the system a test drive with it, all out of sight from regular users.

And slightly off-topic, on the New Color Scheme page, sure would be nice to have some sort of color picker built in.

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My client would love to have user selectable themes! They have a dark and light theme that they would like to present to their commentators.

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I’m bumping against this too - a large handful of my users are complaining that they want dark theming, that the light theme is melting their eyes, which spawned another handful to proclaim that they hate dark theming, and its worse on their eyes…etc etc etc…

Would this be that difficult to solve?

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This is on our tentative roadmap but not slotted for any release yet, the new theme work will have to precede this

5 Likes
25

Implemented per:

5 Likes