Themes for Diatribe

The latest software update has added the functionality for user selectable themes. I’ve added a few options, including a dark version of the current default theme. You can switch themes under you user profile > preferences.

This is brand new functionality, so the current alternative options are a little unpolished. There are likely to be nicer theming options once a few more people in the Discourse community start making and sharing them. :slight_smile:

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There’s now a FakeBook theme, for people who want everything to look the same:

The most recent update removed the category column from the default “Daitribe” theme. Can we put it back?

Done. I thought something looked different, but hadn’t clicked that that was it.

Thanks.

Meanwhile, I’ve been browsing around the Discourse Meta community a bit after @Anna_K mentioned that she hated the interface, looking for the threads on “wah, I want it to look like phpBB”. Sadly, I doubt I have the skills to use their theme explorer to make a phpBB-like categories page (though maybe something will come of this). But I am wondering if we could get an “Old-style” theme which implements the CSS subcategory topic hack (which you’ve enabled in Classic, but needs to be selected each time you enter a category) as a default for all categories, for those who like their categories truly hierarchical?

CSS solutions to what posts to show are very much hacks. That means the risk of them breaking the interface in some situations is high, and it risks breaking on every upgrade (even our current, rather minimal, theming requires fixes on upgrades).

Does anyone really want it to look like phpBB? Or is it the simplicity of an interface/ui they have already learnt to use?

I suspect those two questions are the same question and the answer to both is “yes” - but that doesn’t invalidate the desire

One of them is about structure and behaviour, the other one look and feel. Most phpBB boards looked a little different from each other, but the way they worked was more or less the same. We could make this place look more like phpBB, but that wouldn’t change how it behaved.

Though saying that, sometimes familiarity of look and feel can help people learn new behaviour/UIs.

On that note, you can now make this place look more like facebook if you like (from your user profile/preferences). It doesn’t feel or behave like facebook though. :wink:

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Personally, I’ve grown used to it. I stay up-to-date, so I just read from “latest”, and that works well for me. But I find the mash of topics within some top-level categories (e.g. NZLARPS, or Wellington) messy-but-mostly-tolerable. Others find them on the other side of the tolerable line, because its not what they’re familiar with. I think giving them the option of eliminating that mess and returning to hierarchical browsing might work. And if they can be encouraged to re-engage, they may find a way of using Diatribe which works for them.

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Its probably better with the “always_include_topic_excerpts” option.

For people who want to see the Horror: click on your user icon in the top right, click on the cog, select “interface” in the left column, and choose “Fakebook” from the drop-down under “Theme”. You can change between themes quite easily and select one that works for you.

Oh, I agree its a bug not a feature - I commented in that thread 2 years ago. But I’d like a proper code solution, rather than a visual hack. It looks like the developers are talking about giving us that option.

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