How users will customize the design

[Nuan8]

How are users expected to customize their sites? I think this is a tricky issue but one that needs some thought. Yes some users are ready to start a huge sass project, but most will not want to. But what options are there and what can be made available to them?

I don't have an easy answer to this and I am not trying to criticize the decision to do the design in sass in Discuss. For me, sass presented a hurdle, but I went with it and was able to do a lot of color customization, I was very happy overall with what I could do.

I didn't learn sass, but could have if there had been 2 or 3 designs to choose from, by comparing the code. So that might be one way to help out users, if I had 3 different designs I could have hacked them up and grabbed the best bits of each, even at my limited level.

Past that, I don't even know how one would approach this without sass. So I feel its a problem, when other systems have themes that can be applied fairly freely. I remember Vanilla was fairly easy to make a template, and users would like to do that, make their style available (but as I remember the variation in Vanilla mostly sucked, it was all just slight color changes).

As I know Discuss allows a lot more flexibility overall, but not so much (now) for stuff like, just to name a few basic ones:

moving the sidebar to the left
double sidebars maybe
putting in buttons under header or under search-breadcrumbs (actually probably not so hard)
moving login box

Well, that's all I can think of now. Hope this will be helpful.