Total newbie struggling to preview the signup modal with my test theme, what am I missing?

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Hi everyone,

I’m the furthest thing from a developer (I work in charity community support), but I look after a community forum that uses Discourse (Pro Plus plan), and I’m doing my best to learn. I’m mostly enjoying the process, even if this particular bit has been a headache!

I’ve searched for similar posts on here and asked the Discourse AI bot for help, but I’m still stuck. I’m sorry if I’m missing something obvious.

I’m trying to widen the signup form and reduce the side padding. I’ve created a test theme and added the CSS there, but I can’t figure out how to actually preview the signup form using that test theme. I don’t seem to have any of the “preview as anonymous” options I’ve seen in other places.

So far I’ve tried:

  • Logged in: /signup redirects to the homepage (expected).

  • Logged out: I can access /signup, but only with the default theme, never my test theme.

  • ?preview_theme_id=XX when logged out returns:
    “Failed to preview theme because it doesn’t exist, or you don’t have permission to access it.”

  • Logging in via incognito lets me select the test theme, but then I can’t visit /signup because I’m logged in.

  • I also tried using Discourse Theme Creator, but I believe my theme isn’t eligible to be viewed anonymously and I’d need to be part of a specific group or have sharing permissions enabled to make the theme publicly viewable, so I can only see it as though logged in there as well.

At the moment it feels like I can either see the signup page or see the test theme, but not both at once.

Before I call it a day, is there a simple, supported way for a non-technical admin to preview the signup modal using a non-default theme on a hosted Discourse site (without making it the default theme for everyone)?

Thank you, and apologies if I’m overlooking something straightforward or stupidly obvious. I’m keen to understand the right way to approach this as a total newbie.

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I think you might need to do that in a development environment, which does seem like a big reach (but Install Discourse for development using Docker might not be that hard).

The other way to play it is to live on the edge and just do it on the live site. Unless you get dozens of sign ups a day, it’s likely that no one will notice.

Edit:

That’s what to do!

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Welcome to Meta :waving_hand:

I would join the @theme_creator group, which allows you to share a theme on theme creator so you can look at it without logging in.

You could also add your testing theme as an available theme for users on your forum (but not the new default). With the Sidebar Theme Toggle you could select that theme while you are logged out. But users of course could still see it.

A dev install might also be easier than you expect. I started with a codespace on GitHub where I installed my themes.

Signing up for a 14-day free Discourse trial and using that for testing would work too.

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Hello,

Thanks for the topic, it’s really well explained what you have already tried and I can understand it must be frustrating to figure a non-tech solution out.

if it’s just some simple CSS you’re trying to view live, a browser extension might help you out. Install something like stylus, paste your CSS in, and you can view the logged out signup page, which now includes your styling.

Would that help you out?

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