CSS magicians/theme creators — standardisation of theming practices

This isn’t a complete solve, but I was inspired by this thread to re-architect Minimal 4.4. The theme has been split into partials with files for each feature and plugin it supports. The code compiled and minified using Grunt, which could allow additional checks to be run in the future. I tried to create a folder structure that is as clean as possible to help people navigate what is essentially a collection of around 80 snippets that come together to make Minimal.

You can read more at the bottom of the release notes:

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On the topic of time intensity and difficulty being a barrier to entry, it could be worth seriously considering integrating a donation button directly into themes and plug-ins.
This, with the centralization you’re proposing, could help motivate creators a lot to continue required maintenance on their work. It also could fund the Obsidian team if they wanted to take a small portion of each transaction.

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A lot of Theme Developers already include ways of supporting them through their Github Repository (in the Readme and/or Sidebar) and some, off the top of my head @kepano, include a link at the bottom of their Style Settings. Personally I feel like the monetisation portion of Theme Development is a little tricky since no one wants to come off as though they are expecting users to pay them for their work. Would it be nice? Sure. As mentioned it takes a lot of time to maintain themes, but by no means should it be expected in my opinion. I feel like for most Theme Developers it’s just a way to give back to a great community and to have a project to work away at.

If the Community Theme Store gets reworked, then an option to add a donation link for your theme could be an option. But that is entirely up to Obsidian developers.

With a stronger push for monetary support, there would be greater expectations out of Theme Developers and not all have dedicated time to work on their themes but only portions of the day/week to chip away at it.

As for splitting donations between Theme Developers and Obsidian Developers, I personally don’t feel like the amount of money being donated at the moment is significant enough for it to be something that is worth considered at the moment. Also there are already multiple ways of supporting the development of Obsidian directly with Sync, Publish, Catalyst, Commercial Licences, etc.

I have read this thread and being a regular user in the category use community theme and style with Style Plugin I have almost no experience/knowledge of CSS.

I have 2 CSS snippets active:

  • header.css (to make all headers h1 … h6 a different color, I like colorfull themes)
  • frontmatter.css (to hide frontmatter in read view)

I would suggest to create CM5 versions of themes and build further with CM6 theme versions. Using the legacy old editor is a choice people make. By doing that they accept to not have all the features CM6 gives you. The same reasoning can be applied to themes. CM5 editor is current version of theme. When you use the new CM6 editor you get all the bells-and-whistles.

Just a user’s opinion ;-

Regards,
Jeroen