Ralkage See, that’s the beauty of Flarum, you can shape it into whatever you want it to look and feel like 🙂 if there were strict design constraints, every theme would end up looking the same and lose its identity.
Good to see you back here! I understand what you're saying but I don't entirely agree, I mean, style is one thing and a design system is another. The design system is the foundation that makes the interface feel consistent, accessible, and precisely easy to customize. For example, I'm not sure if shadcn rings a bell? Many people think that using it means having the same UI as a thousand other apps, but the reason that happens is simply because most people don't customize the shadcn components, not because it can't be done. On the contrary, creating themes is considerably easier.
luceos I completely agree. Software like Flarum would benefit massively from a comprehensive design system, I don't consider it a "whim", it's a matter of simplifying the DX (developers shouldn't have to be UI/UX experts), establishing best practices, and maintaining design consistency... etc. I've dedicated a lot of time to analyzing all of this, especially diving into third-party extensions. That's when you truly understand the countless use cases and challenges developers have faced and solved in their own ways, which inevitably fragments the design with custom solutions. I believe that with sufficient effort, the vast majority of these patterns can be understood and unified.
For Flarum, this is entirely achievable, I mean, it's not in the disastrous state that WordPress is in. That's a clear example of highly extensible software that has completely failed at design consistency, it's genuinely hard to find a settings section in any plugin that resembles anything else.
I'm not sure if I've shared this before, but the projects I worked on for 2.0 were extremely productive, and I've been integrating them into a larger project called "Flarum UI". My goal isn't just to prototype Flarum entire design system, but to refine it, with polished components and new ones that address the needs currently forcing developers to build custom interfaces for specific implementations. I want to materialize all of this in Figma following best practices, then document it with Storybook (docs, MCP...) and integrate Chromatic.
From there, we could gradually build out the complete component and pattern system in the flarum/core. I won't lie, with my full-time job, this is quite a challenging thing to tackle as a hobby, but I believe it should be a priority for the project, at least in the long term.
