Sidebar Theme Toggle

[Discourse]

	Summary	Sidebar Theme Toggle adds a theme selector in the sidebar menu’s footer provided there is more than 1 user selectable theme. This selector works with both logged-on users and anonymous users. Be sure to add this to all your user-selectable themes for easy toggling.
	Repository Link	https://github.com/discourse/discourse-sidebar-theme-toggle
	New to Discourse Themes?	Beginner’s guide to using Discourse Themes

Install this theme component

As this is an official theme component maintained by the Discourse team, support, bug, ux, and feature requests can be made in the respective categories here on Meta, and tagged with the appropriate theme component tag. Click on a link below to get one started.

 Support  Bug  UX  Feature

Features

We may do some additional work here in the future to make this a more comprehensive menu that allows users to choose colors, font-sizes, and theme from one menu — but for now this grants sites the same basic behavior as the Hamburger Theme Selector!

Name	Description
toggle icon
hide theme name

Hosted by us? Theme components are available to use on our Standard, Business, and Enterprise plans.

Last edited by @JammyDodger 2024-06-15T13:42:31Z

Check document

Perform check on document:

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

Will it work someday with iPhone/iPad too?

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

It should already work on mobile devices, but let us know if there are any issues!

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

Well… it doesn’t Not here, not on my own.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

ah I see, I’ll have to double check the app, looks like the footer’s getting cut off there… thanks for mentioning it!

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

You are totally right. The issue is the Hub.

[stuwest]

This is a great idea for a component, but I’m having a little difficulty getting it to work. I’ve installed it and included it in all my themes but the drop-down doesn’t appear. If I toggle the “hide theme name” setting, the keyboard shortcut icon moves from the left side of the sidebar footer to the right, but no theme selector.

[davidkingham]

Thanks Kris, unfortunately it’s not working on my site. Did a hard refresh of course, tried different themes that have no other components, don’t see anything relevant in the console or logs…

[MarcP]

Rebuild your instance. It will fix all of the issues mentioned above so far.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

oh yes, I should have mentioned that if you haven’t updated Discourse in the past few days you should do that as well

[stuwest]

I think I’m on the most recent version…

I’ll try rebuilding later. Our users tend to freak out a bit if the site goes offline with no warning.

[MarcP]

@stuwest

I’ll try rebuilding later. Our users tend to freak out a bit if the site goes offline with no warning.

You should consider this

Add an offline page to display when Discourse is rebuilding or starting up

This guide is intended for advanced users, who are already using nginx outside the docker container. By following this guide you make your setup more complicated and will loose some speed benefits like HTTP2 if you’re not running Ubuntu 16.04 or later. Proceed with caution! When Discourse is rebuilding or starting up, your users will usually either see an error message from their browser… [image] …or a not-so-nice 502 error message from Nginx: [image] If you’re a perfectionist l…

[AquaL1te]

What about a dark theme selector? For light, dark and auto. That seems broken since I switched to the sidebar.

[Ahmed26]

It would be nice to add color palettes as well. Is this possible?

[merefield (Robert)]

Just create a separate Theme with a different name and configure its colour pallette differently. Done.

[Carleas (Michael Corliss)]

Weird thing on the Meta, the “Hidden Whispers” theme only appears when the current theme is “Central”, “Default (full-width)”, “Fully”, “Meta Branded”, or “redditish”. Example:

Default:

redditish:

Not sure if it’s relevant, but I noticed while writing this that the themes where “Hidden Whispers” shows up are also the ones where the reply box covers up the theme toggle.

Hidden Whispers also doesn’t have a description in the theme category that I can find. This appears to be the only other mention of its existence? I feel like I’m losing my mind

edit: This might not be related to this theme-commponent, I see the same behavior in the profile > interface > theme menu.

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

That’s a theme that the staff uses in cases where they may be taking a screenshot of Meta or something similar and don’t want whispers to be included. We have a separate theme component meant to hide it from the themes list for normal non-staff accounts, but it wasn’t added everywhere.

I think it should be fixed now, it shouldn’t appear in the list for you while using any theme. Apologies for the confusion!

[Carleas (Michael Corliss)]

Ah, thank you for the clarification, the world makes sense again!

[nwnuyhs (Yang Hongsheng)]

Very good,I like it