Themes for diaspora* interface

We've had discussions about this in the past. While editing your pod's stylesheet is definitely doable, doing a completely custom layout would be somewhat difficult. Libertree allows users to enter their own custom CSS into a setting in the user panel, but only the stylesheet is being changed, not the templates or the views.

When people say that they want user themes, they typically think of theming in the way that it works for Wordpress: there's a directory for JS, one for CSS, and one for templates. Diaspora has a lot of templates for all of the different views it provides to the user.

Effectively, you'd have to take all of Diaspora's interface elements, views, and javascript bits, turn them into templates, and put them into a folder. You'd then have to tell the app to look for a theme within a specific directory.

The problem with such an implementation is that it goes against some of the default conventions of Ruby on Rails. The second problem is that it's also a lot of difficult work.

Please tell me where I can read some of Ruby on Rails conventions.

Juan, I'm guessing this would be a good place to start: http://rubyonrails.org/documentation/

Hi Alex, and welcome to Diaspora.

It's a good idea to search for previous discussions on a topic before starting a new one. One this (and related) topics, there are:

• https://www.loomio.org/d/mxab4QiI/develop-a-frontend-theme-system
• https://www.loomio.org/d/KZJhVLgM/develop-diaspora-design-and-identity
• https://www.loomio.org/d/1CcyIVO0/using-own-template-design
• https://www.loomio.org/d/XPufK6eC/information-only-about-design
• and possibly a few others.

Hope those discussions provide the answers you’re looking for.

Here’s a useful introduction to using Loomio for discussions and proposals: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Discussion_and_voting#Using_Loomio

Best wishes,
Goob