New theme for this forum

Meta
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A new theme has been proposed many times for this forum, and so far not taken up. Let’s break the impasse!

Background

I made the current default theme based on the now-legacy SuttaCentral. We tried updating to match the new site, but the theme was broken in too many ways. We also have a bunch of rather hastily cobbled-together themes. These are neither pretty nor accessible. Nor are they up-to-date with Discourse.

Plan

  • get rid of all old themes
  • use properly designed new themes
  • offer a few carefully selected themes made by designers, including light and dark

Requirements

Both default theme and all optional themes must satisfy these.

  • SuttaCentral’s Skolar fonts. Theme fonts must be replaced.
  • SC lotus logo
  • default theme must be highly accessible.
  • making me happy :wink:

Non-requirements

  • backwards-compatibility
  • Using SC color scheme.
  • making everyone else happy :woman_shrugging:

Themes

Default

Options

  • Discourse Light (plain but clear, well-tested, highly accessible)
  • Discourse Dark
  • Grey Amber: dark with bright yellow accents, I use this myself
  • Solarized (this uses the dark solarized color scheme, a highly tested and rigorous set of colors that’s widely used by programmers).
  • Sunflower. It’s bright, cheery, simple, highly accessible, and its yellow colors are not too different from SC. This would be my second choice for a default.
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:+1: As long as there’s a dark option, I’m happy :smile:

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Them sunflower gets my vote :sunflower:

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Where can we inspect Discourse Dark, Light, and Grey Amber pl ?

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This takes the pressure off, eh?

I actually prefer if the look and feel of the Discourse side of things is very distinct from the main site. Especially the favicon (I’d say the favicon being different from the main site is an absolute must.)

I see many people online thinking that the discussion forum is the same thing as the sutta site. Maybe a different look and feel wouldn’t fix that, but it couldn’t hurt.

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I was arguing the opposite of Snowbird previously. But this argument is very persuasive. I think I support it.

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Sorry, they’re all options on https://meta.discourse.org/

As it is at the moment, right?

But yes, I think a visual relation with distinct identity is good.

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Yes, yes. Sorry.

I can say, though, that it’s always bothered me that the icon in the top corner of the screen…
image
didn’t match the favicon.

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Not the fact that the SuttaCentral icon on the Home page of the forum is the “wheel” icon from our old website? :laughing:

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Oh, I only use the dark theme. That saves me from the wheel irritation.

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How many of the options are we going to get?

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+1 to this.

Zeronoise is super clean as the default.

Could we have maybe 4 options? 2 clean light/dark and 2 with added color light/dark?

If one broke how hard would it be to remove it and default to another for those users?

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All of them!

The only thing I’m unsure about is which is better as default:

New theme
  • Zeronoise (slick and elegant)
  • Sunflower (bright and friendly)
0 voters
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I need to think about this. I’ll definitely choose Sunflower for my personal use.

The real question is, which of these two is best for our public image … bbl.

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IMO the slight color difference between Sunflower and SC homepage could lead one to think that a perfect match just was not available (i.e. look unprofessional).

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Oh interesting. I thought a bit differently: the near match represents the loose affinity between the two sites.

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I can see it that way, too. It’s quite possible I’m overthinking it :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I agree with @owl. Either a clearly different or identical theme to the SC site. A close yet slightly different match seems to suggest not enough attention to detail.

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Sunflower: my eye automatically sees the separation of elements ( I.e posts, titles, menu bar etc) and thus makes it easier ( for me anyway) to scan and browse. Maybe because I am used to this layout/ colouring scheme, I may be subconsciously biased. :wink:Asked my partner who doesn’t use the forum to give their opinion, went for sunflower straightaway.

Zero noise: beautiful to look at but does not do the above for me. Also looks like a minimal blogging theme

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Has this been deployed yet? I need dark mode in my life! Middle of the night insomnia leads me here but is probably reinforcing with the bright phone light :candle:

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