Fomio — web theme

The Discourse theme for Fomio's web surface. A Reddit alternative: many small communities with one feed across them.

Lives in the Fomio monorepo at apps/web/ (imported from the fomio-web rebuild). The previous theme is archived at apps/web-legacy/ — quarry only.

Backend is the existing https://meta.fomio.app (Discourse 2026.8.0). This is a theme — not a fork, not a headless client.

The one rule

Discourse owns data, vocabulary and configuration. The theme owns layout and behaviour.

The previous web theme was rebuilt from scratch because mobile-app assumptions got frozen into code as literals. Before writing any value here, find where Discourse already holds it:

Need	Lives in	Not in
Colours	about.json colour schemes → var(--primary)	hex in SCSS
Product words	Discourse translations and the existing site-text overrides	copied or hardcoded wording in theme code
Communities	the category tree	a list in code
Which feed tabs show	top_menu site setting	hardcoded nav
Feed ranking	/hot — core's gravity score	our own algorithm
Voting, karma, reactions, chat	core plugins, enabled by site setting	our own plugin

Four scripts enforce the mechanical parts. Run them before pushing:

./scripts/check-native.sh     # no colour literals, no Hub/Teret/Byte in code
./scripts/check-variables.sh  # every custom property exists in core (R3)
./scripts/check-scss.sh       # compiles
./scripts/check-duplication.sh # no inserted headers/nav; outlets only from its allowlist

check-variables.sh reads a Discourse checkout (DISCOURSE_SRC, skipped if absent). CSS fails silently on an unknown custom property, so a misspelled variable looks exactly like a working one — this is the only check that sees it. Keep the checkout on the same version as the server.

Brand

The Fomio and Fomio AMOLED colour schemes ship in about.json as the theme's defaults. They are defaults, not constants — an admin can edit them in Admin → Customize → Colors, and every rule in this theme picks the change up because nothing references a colour directly.

Development

Iterate locally against an isolated (non-default) theme on the server:

cd apps/web
discourse_theme watch .

Source of truth: this monorepo path (apps/web/). Point Discourse at the Fomio GitHub repo / theme path that serves this directory. The standalone fomio-web repo is historical — do not keep it as an active write target.

Install / preview as a non-default theme via Admin → Customize → Themes until ready. Previewing a non-default theme does not affect anyone else.

Layout

about.json          colour schemes, theme metadata
common/             styles and templates for every surface
desktop/ mobile/    surface-specific overrides
javascripts/        api-initializers and components
locales/            theme-owned strings only
scripts/            the native-values guard

State

Restarted 2026-09-26 — see docs/00-roadmap.md. Imported into the monorepo as the live apps/web theme. The first rebuild pass remains on the external repo's archive/v0 branch; the monorepo's previous theme is apps/web-legacy/ (git branch archive/apps-web-legacy).