New Check out Muut IO for developers
Muut Blog

Muut Designer

Muut Inc • 2013-11-26

Change typography and sizing in seconds without CSS skills!

Note Muut Designer is merged into MINI plan.



Muut Designer

Muut Designer is the new default way of styling Muut forums. Customizing your entire forum theme now takes mere minutes — no CSS skills required.

Endless options

Muut Designer is a sidebar you can reveal by clicking “Designer” in the forum navigation when logged in on your forum as an administrator. There are sections Themes, Options, Colors, and Typography. You can go for a “boxed post” look with partial transparency, gradients, shadows, rounded avatars and a background pattern — or maybe a flatter look with a plain color background and no transparency suits your site better.

Muut Designer menus

Designer option panels

Muut Designer options

Customizing is really easy even if you're not the techy type. Using an intuitive Area selector, you can choose where to apply gradients and shadows, or what colour everything is. The color picker shows the currently selected color in a larger circle to better see where you are going.

Muut Designer width setting

Maximum forum width, overall sizing, overall spacing, and box rounding are just some of the things you can adjust in the Designer by using simple sliders.

Avatar roundness can also be set using a slider: hard corners, slightly smoothed, completely round, or anything in between.

Themes

In case you find the options overwhelming, we included a few ready-made themes to use as starting points for your designs — or as-is, if you don’t feel like twiddling with knobs.

Branding upgrade

Our Branding package gets some extra features with this upgrade: when you click “Save changes” in the designer, your hosted forum at muut.com/[forum-name] instantly switches to that theme. When you embed the forum, the saved theme is automatically included. You can also modify it on-site and save the design by clicking “Save changes”.

Muut Designer themes

With Branding upgrade you also get a full access to a growing selection of ready-made themes. While other users get two tasters from each of our design categories — Minimalist, Functional, Playful — Branding subscribers have 16 themes to use or build upon. More themes will be added in future updates!

Future-proof

During our ongoing beta phase, some users have noticed that custom on-site CSS styling can sometimes cause some things to break when new Muut versions come along with new elements, features, changes to the way the page is structured, or CSS class name changes. Once we exit our beta, things will calm down, but Designer-built custom themes are guaranteed to work even if some of the underlying structures should change. That way you can concentrate on making Muut look like you want, and make it work when embedded on a page with existing styling.

Without further ado… Log in to your forum and get designing!

The complete discussion system for your site

Try all features 14 days without credit card. Ready to upgrade? Check our plans and pricing.