Questions about Forking Themes

[Saturn Wind]

Hi,

We are totally new to NodeBB. We are highly impressed as of thus far, and are looking to migrate our community over the coming months. We have a lot of custom code, plugins, and design related work, so customizability is important to us.

We have been reading the documentation extensively to prepare to port our current design over. The design process itself looks fairly straightforward (we are VERY glad to see that the templates are totally modifiable), but we are having some difficulty understanding exactly how to install the newly forked quickstart theme. I have not been able to find any documentation on this directly. We are a little unsure of where to actually put the new theme or how to install it to a live NodeBB installation.

I'm probably missing something obvious here, definitely a question that someone new to the platform would ask. In any case, we would greatly appreciate any pointers, thank you in advance.

[PitaJ]

@saturn-wind I recently had a long discussion about plugin and theme development here, which probably has an answer to your question:

https://community.nodebb.org/topic/15377/plugin-development-2021-updated-environment-and-dev-workflow-request

[crazycells]

@saturn-wind I think Pitaj's linked thread answers your question in detail.

But if I understood your question correctly, in summary, we forked persona theme in our own Github page and then made the changes (make sure you change name, description, preview etc. to distinguish it from the original theme), then directly installed it to our forum using git clone ...

Afterward, on your ACP, you click Appearance > Themes ... you should see your theme there, then select your custom theme and rebuild the forum.

I think as an alternative you can publish your theme in npm and then use npm or plugin search to install it.

[PitaJ]

@crazycells it's not recommended to fork the persona theme, but instead to make a child theme

[crazycells]

@pitaj said in Questions about Forking Themes:

@crazycells it's not recommended to fork the persona theme, but instead to make a child theme

thanks for the info, I will let our team know that.

I think we did not have any problem so far, because we have only very minimal changes. (adding location input to the registration page, adding a page navigation bar to the top, changing how last posts look on categories pages etc.)

[Saturn Wind]

Thank you all for the help as of thus far. I've read the linked thread in detail and it helped us to get it to install onto our forum. It displays properly under plugins, but it doesn't appear under "themes" even after a rebuild.

Is there anything else we might be missing?

[PitaJ]

@saturn-wind please tell me what you did

[Saturn Wind]

@pitaj
We did a git clone of the quickstart repository, and modified the theme.json, package.json, and plugin.json files to replace instances of "quickstart" with a custom name as per the documentation. We then did an "npm link" in the directory and followed with an "npm link [theme_directory]" in the nodeBB install.

This appears to have worked, it displays exactly as expected under the installed plugins page, but appears to be missing under the themes page.

[baris]

What is the name of the theme? It should start with nodebb-theme-* if I am not mistaken.

[Saturn Wind]

@baris
Named it "nodebb-theme-ocean" and changed all instances in the folder name, and theme.json, plugin.json, and package.json files. We added the "screenshot" into the package.json file as per the documentation, but other than replacing instances of "quickstart", it's pretty much the stock theme.