Recommendations on layouts? A way to preview changes?

[Heather_Phillips]

Just wanted to close the loop here in case anyone else is curious about how to get a look similar to discuss.codeacademy.com with a custom home page banner. We ended up using this guide from @awesomerobot to get a banner that only shows on the home page. Not as fancy as theirs, but gets the job done!

How to add custom content that only appears on your homepage

A very common situation you’ll find yourself in as a theme developer is the need to create a customization that only shows on the homepage of your community. You might add some HTML to the “After Header” section of your theme, which will then appear on every page. You can jump through some hoops in CSS to hide this everywhere except the homepage… but instead let’s utilize the Plugin API so your content is only loaded on the homepage to begin with. All of this can be added to the </head> (head_…

And then used the Category Banners

Discourse Category Banners

This theme component uses existing category details to create banners for your category pages. It uses the category name, description, and color to generate a banner at the top of the relevant category pages (for tags check out Discourse Tag Banners). The category description is defined by the first paragraph in each category’s “Category definition for …” topic. The banner background/text colors are defined by your category badge settings. [54%20PM] By default this will display on desktop an…

The CSS tweaks were helpful for the color scheme of unread counts, etc.

Thanks all!