Updating, sorting, date modified, and view modes for Community Themes

The following features requests are for the Community Themes plugin settings pane.

Sorting and reverse sorting

  • Date Added (newest to oldest)
  • Date Modified (newest to oldest)
  • Name (a to z)
  • Author (a to z)

Metadata

  • Date Modified

View Modes for faster browsing

  • Single column (current design)
  • Grid view
  • List view

Bonus feature

  • Update button
    To update the currently active theme to the newest version from Github.
14 Likes

I think Iā€™m in agreement to pretty much all of these.

Iā€™m not sure about the technicalities of date updated, though. Currently the theme list is pulled from a single location, and when you apply the theme, it goes and fetches the data from that themeā€™s github repo. To get the date updated, the plugin would have to ping the repos of each theme individually to get the data for the last commit (youā€™d probably specifically want the last commit that touched obsidian.css).

Alternately, one could potentially make a script that goes and gets those commit times and updates the main metadata once per day or something :thinking: but that would require something outside of Obsidian. Not impossible, though.

An update button is also potentially tricky in that Obsidian will have to keep track of when the theme was last updated, and possibly also if youā€™ve made your own changes to obsidian.css as well (as any changes would get wiped when the theme updates). Though I guess that would be covered with the current warning you get when you apply a themeā€¦

Yep, thatā€™s why I listed that as a bonus or stretch goal. Being able to see the date modified would be sufficient to decide to update or not.


Sorting
A default sort of newest added to oldest would solve being unaware of new themes being added.


All other items in the request are just nice-to-have additions.

At this point, with new display features that actually affect the CSS coming out on a regular basis, a ā€œlast updatedā€ field of some sort is starting to feel extremely useful ā€“ if only so that we can tell if something is likely to have integrated some of the new changes.

Not so necessary a month ago, but it would be pretty useful now.

1 Like

Just today I was looking for what Themes were now available after using the base Obsidian theme for about 4 months. I was particularly trying to find ones that were the most recently created/modified so as not to select one that had been created, then ā€˜neglectedā€™. Tonight while scanning the forum I came upon this thread. So, Iā€™ve bumped it up with the expectation that one of the moderators might offer some comment in light of the current Obsidian status. When visiting GitHub, I was surprised that many of the themes seemed to have been created/posted 5 months ago. Thatā€™s a long time in Obsidian life, with updates coming out every 8-10 days.

2 Likes

Use case or problem

As a theme author, one of the major friction points I run into is releasing updates to my theme. I frequently get bug reports that are fixed by instructing users on how to update the theme to the latest version. Itā€™s not clear to users how to update a theme, or even if it needs updating.

Proposed solution

The ideal solution would be for themes to have versioning like plugins and a Check for updates button that could update any outdated themes.

As an aside, it would also be valuable for the theme readme to be viewable by usersā€”similar to pluginsā€”so theme authors could display things like recommended plugins, or troubleshooting instructions.

Current workaround (optional)

Currently, users have to search for the already-installed theme and click Use. But there is no way to determine which version of a theme is currently active.

Related feature requests (optional)

5 Likes

Most of this will be implemented in 0.12.17. If you have other specific requests open new FRs.

This topic was automatically closed 24 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.