NodeBB should have more themes
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Excited for NodeBB 0.50 and I agree, some more themes would be nice, but I don't think the NodeBB team should make them. I think more community members should make and distribute their own themes in the NodeBB Themes category.
I only see a few actual themes there and most of them are sadly reskins or modifications of the base theme, with the exception of @trevor's magical wonderland.
Side note: I think we should also be able to tag and sort threads that have actual themes in them instead of having to dig through all those "help how 2 do dis" threads to find the actual community themes.
Also, there are a few Bootstrap reskins in the ACP I believe, but the old Bootstrap theme and its reskins are very buggy for me.
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Yeah, but it would be nice to see some more activity in making themes for this platform.
I'm working on finally getting my own NodeBB forum set up and running with immense amounts of help from @bentael with migration from the inferior software I used to use, so I'll definitely be looking into making a theme or two. -
I wrote a guide awhile ago on my blog... sadly it's out of date. I'll revisit that after writing the next theme for v0.5.0, now that a lot of things are more solid (we can finally get i8n for themes as of today ;)) I can finally sit down and write a proper tutorial
For now, you could fork this repo and go from there. Or you can do what @trevor did which was basically modify the Vanilla theme and learn everything from that repo itself
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I'm thinking that the majority of themes made will be mostly incremental changes to existing themes (colour variants, small template changes), which is definitely good.
The main barrier for me is that I lose interest in theming after the majority of the creative work is done
(e.g. Viridian sidebar was fun, but theming the rest was and still is a slog) -
@Flexi-Hackify Click here to go check out my new theme Classic
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@luke said:
I only see a few actual themes there and most of them are sadly reskins or modifications of the base theme, with the exception of @trevor's magical wonderland.
@a_5mith said:
@luke yeah I'm not a fan of the bootstrap skins, the trouble with theming is once you've seen @trevor's theme, you just know it won't be quite as good.
Thank you guys so much, how flattering.
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@psychobunny said:Or you can do what @trevor did which was basically modify the Vanilla theme and learn everything from that repo itself.
Yup, Vanilla based and my theme is still
nodebb-theme-vanilla. I just never changed it, but I plan on changing it soon enough because of the npm and nodebb upgrade conflicts of overriding everything.-_-
Here's the process though... Interestingly enough I started by stripping out the things I'd prob never use in Bootstrap for a forum frontend (maybe backend but I stripped it out anyway).And worked my way from the center in an outward pattern. So this means I began customizing everything from inside the
<div id="content" class="container">...</div>then the header and footer. 8-14 hours a day, at 500~ iterations a day (because sometimes when you don't have a plan, and its just you, you ask yourself "does this look right?"). I use the same template pattern but add or remove different things.I believe the LESS combined without including Bootstrap's Less and just my own custom one should be around 12,000 or so with about 2,000~ lines of code thats commented and commented out.
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I've started on a theme I will release for the community but I can't give an ETA on this because I am hammered with other things at the moment. I am still learning everyday new things about NodeBB and how far I can push its limits which almost seem endless.
