Relative lack of themes - am I missing something?

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

@codinghorror

OK! It sounds like you have very specific needs. You might consider paying someone to help you meet those needs to expedite your experience.

Since I am working on multiple Discourse projects, mostly for others, the needs are quite varied, as are the budgets. But I am absolutely keeping custom dev in mind and would gladly use it where resources allow.

@HAWK

Totally agree. We are in the process of updating that to show some more diverse design options.

Excellent! I’m glad to hear you see the need for that as well.

@pfaffman

Have you seen the > 150 entries in Search results for ‘#theme’ - Discourse Meta? Many of those offer significant changes in functionality. There are only ~40 items in Search results for ‘#theme-full’ - Discourse Meta, and some of those do make some rather significant changes to how things look.

Indeed I have! Theme Components are one of my very favorite things about Discourse and I make extensive use of them. But the core aesthetic and “ease of use”/“cleanliness” of the system stays fairly similar despite most of them.

@_diondiondion

I’m not sure if this actually has any effect on the number of themes or the willingness of other people to make them, but just from my own experience, the structure of Discourse’s HTML markup and CSS classes isn’t very well architected for easy or efficient theming.

@_diondiondion

simple tweaks often take more work than they should, e.g. because there’s no single selector for them

Excellent, thank you for this perspective. I’m not very skilled with CSS, certainly not enough to feel confident saying that the architecture of Discourse (or any tool) could be better rather than it being just my lack of understanding that limits things. It’s good to know there is room for improvement here.

@awesomerobot

All that said… we definitely want to update the topic list and topic page markup in the near future. We dropped IE11 support last year, so we can structure things in a simpler way that allows us to better utilize modern CSS layout features like Flexbox and Grid. This will also make it easier to make more dramatic layout changes.

@awesomerobot

tl;dr: we hear you! and we’re thinking about how we can reduce these barriers too!

This is really good to hear. I can appreciate the difficulty involved in overhauling things, and how much one proposed, seemingly small change, can necessarily lead to many others. I’m glad that, despite the challenge, there is internal momentum to improve things over time. And an aside, thank you for all the theme and theme component work you do! I make frequent use of your creations.

@Alec

Great for inspiration for me, when I upgrade my forum in the summer

Thank you for the examples. The BabyPips one is particularly impressive and interesting!

@codinghorror

there are often contractual limitations with enterprise customers that literally prevent us from discussing those customers and those customizations, from a legal perspective

Indeed! When I asked if there were any examples you “can” share, I was implying an understanding of this fact, but I realize it may not be clear or explicit.

I am absolutely supportive of Discourse as a company making money, and understand all the stuff that comes along with that, including NDAs, possible exclusivity agreements for certain custom features, and more. The fact that the customizations do trickle down to the open source code is testament to you doing it right, and I appreciate that.

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Thanks everyone for the input! I now feel both more clear in understanding why things may be the way they are at present, and more hopeful that things will improve for those closer to my level of skill, use case, and budget in the future. Eventually I would love to see a thriving 3rd party theme ecosystem/community/market, and would gladly pay e.g. $50 for a nice, customized theme, as I and many others do frequently in the Wordpress (and other CMS/forum system) world.

I recognize there are potential problems with this approach, and many “garbage” themes as well. But after 15+ years of customizing off-the-shelf CMSs, themes, and plugins, and comparing them to the quotes I have gotten for full custom development of similar designs and features, I am confident that there is a valuable place for this type of ecosystem. I see it as sitting beneath the full custom commercial options that Discourse offers (where cost is a barrier), and “above”/alongside the full DIY open source approach (where skill and time are barriers). In my experience of other systems that work similarly, this “middle way” has enabled good results in a reasonable time for those who have more limited budgets/abilities/time lines (this is basically every small business, sole proprietor, etc. that I have ever worked with).