Theme Creator, create and show themes without installing Discourse!

A few months ago I raised the idea of an Easy Theme Creator. The idea was to have a place where anyone can hack on themes without installing Discourse. Since the plan was set in motion @David_Taylor has been super busy making all the lego pieces fall into place.

The result is https://discourse.theme-creator.io/ , logging in is SUPER easy, just hit the login button and you will be logged in via meta.

Once logged in you will see this giant button:

When you click it you will arrive at your “theme authoring” interface:

The interface has full parity with the admin interface, including live CSS refresh, what more you can use the theme CLI: Install the Discourse Theme CLI console app to help you build themes

All members of the @theme_creator group have the special ability to share themes. So, for example you can check out my simple theme at: https://discourse.theme-creator.io/theme/sam/simple (even anonymous can check out my theme!)

We look forward to feedback here, if any of you theme authors feel like sprucing up the theme-creator site, let me know and link me to your proposed theme.

If you have any themes or theme components please feel free to link your theme or theme-component topics to the preview so people can check them out.

For tips on getting started, see

69 Likes

Maybe this topic can be updated to say “Go to your profile and then select the Themes tab” since the “My Themes” button does not seem to exist anymore?
I was initially looking for that (see below)

Original Message

I’m failing at the simple step of clicking the “My Themes” button, it does not exist :sweat_smile:

On inspection of the page source code, it appears that the string “My Themes” does not exist at all. I am logged in, so that shouldn’t be the issue.

2 Likes

Would it be possible to turn on Discourse Chat in Theme Creator?

We’d like to try a few things there which modifies the chat interface.

2 Likes

If you have a live site then using the theme cli to work on a hidden theme on your live site is how I would do development.

5 Likes

Yeah running against a separate site would probably be the best strategy.

Enabling chat on theme creator would mean we have to start moderating it (or introduce some kind of auto-destruct system like we have for topics), so it’s not just a case of flipping a switch.

2 Likes

Thanks - I’ve set up a staging site for some deeper messing about with chat and some other things too.

Regarding Theme Creator, it might help in making the showcasing of chat (or should I say DM) customisations more accessible. Take your point that an auto-destruct would be needed. Isn’t that already there as a configurable site setting?

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Yup, got that in place too. The issue is that I don’t want my dev to have admin access to our production site due to the sensitive data within - this is required in order to mess with Theme / Component settings.

4 Likes