The new color palette interface seamlessly integrates with the overall admin design system, delivering a cohesive experience that makes palette management both powerful and approachable.
This matches the previews that are now also available in other areas where you select colour palettes - on the palette list page, in user preferences, and in theme settings.
How to access the new interface
The new colour palette UI is available now for all Discourse sites! You can access it by:
Going to Admin → Appearance → Color palettes
Clicking Edit on any existing palette, or the New button to create a new palette.
This latest update represents our ongoing commitment to providing admins with powerful, user-friendly tools for customizing the appearance of their Discourse communities.
The enhanced interface makes it easier than ever to create beautiful, branded experiences for your members while maintaining the flexibility and control you need.
Have questions or feedback about the new interface? We’d love to hear from you in the replies below!
Would it be possible to allow finer color settings? There are lots of calculations to get subtle shades of the entered color codes and not all of them work great for some scenarios. I would normally do it in custom CSS but I set up Horizon theme and it has no way to edit CSS. So I realized it anyway belongs to the color palette setting.
Actually the best would be to add a custom CSS option in here (obviously one would only play with colors) and to also allow Horizon to edit color palette CSS.
BUT my point here was more general (not just Horizon). If the Color palettes feature is supposed to allow people switching color schemes as they wish, custom CSS would not help a lot. The custom CSS would have to be assigned to each color palette. From the architecture perspective.
Could you give some more context for what kind of things you want to do with finer colour settings? That would help see if there’s something we could improve in the palette UI, or if custom CSS is the best solution.
Currently my issue is with the tertiary color. Let’s say the color of my choice is #f7b618. It’s a light yellow and I want to see it somewhere. Having it as a button color looks great but button texts are white. But if I set a button text it changes other colors. I guess the problem is that you just suppose I select a dark color so the button texts will be light.
Also all kinds of shades are calculated by the tertiary color. E.g. sidebar background (still talking about Horizon theme). And I might want to choose other color for that (altogether, e.g. just grey).
So whenever I am a little bit picky about the colors AND I want to let the user select a color palette (which I agree might be a little contradictory) I might use a color palette based custom CSS.
Another option could be some Advanced mode where you would allow to assign ANY color variables. Not just those 12 main ones. So then you would stop calculating and let me adjust all the colors by hand but still using UI.