I just published a theme I’ve been refining for a while, now open source under MIT: a clean, modern look built around translucent, frosted-glass surfaces (header, sidebar, search) with a purpose-built light and dark color scheme — no hardcoded colors, everything tied to Discourse’s CSS custom properties, so it works out of the box with automatic light/dark switching.
Repo: GitHub - terraboss/discourse-terraglass · GitHub
Features
- Frosted glass surfaces — header, sidebar/hamburger menu, and the header search field/dropdown are semi-transparent with a backdrop blur, opacity and blur strength both configurable
- Separate, purpose-built light and dark color schemes (not just an inverted single scheme), checked against WCAG AA contrast for text and UI elements
- X/Twitter-style onebox link previews with a hairline border and rounded corners
- Etiquette-style flag/arrow-shaped tags
- Fixed 16:9 video embeds on every device
- Zebra-striped topic list with a subtle hover state
- Configurable corner rounding across buttons, cards, modals and inputs
- Accessible focus outline that uses the scheme’s own text color, so it stays visible in both light and dark mode
- Everything above is a theme setting — turn off or tune whatever you don’t want
Installation
Customize → Themes → Install → From a git repository:
https://github.com/terraboss/discourse-terraglass
That also gives you one-click “Check for updates” going forward.
Known issue
backdrop-filter (the blur behind the sidebar, hamburger menu and search panel) doesn’t render in every browser/Discourse combination, even though the transparency itself works reliably and degrades gracefully on its own. I’m tracking that here: backdrop-filter blur has no effect on .menu-panel — if anyone has run into this or has ideas, I’d be glad to hear them.
Feedback welcome, happy to take feature requests or bug reports on the repo.