How to ship your first skin to the community gallery

You built a custom MOLTamp skin (if you have not yet, see Building your first MOLTamp skin). It looks great. You want to share it. Here is the actual process from "I have a folder" to "100 people have downloaded my skin."

Step 1: Make sure it actually works

Before you ship, run your skin against real content for at least an hour. Open a real project, run actual code, type real prompts into your AI agent, watch how the syntax highlighting handles your color choices, look at how the panel borders interact with terminal output.

Common issues that only show up in real use:

Bright text on bright background somewhere you forgot
A color combination that becomes unreadable when there is real terminal output instead of a mock screenshot
An accent color that gets used for too many things and starts to feel like an alarm
Effects (glow, scanlines) that look fine for 5 minutes but become exhausting for an hour

Fix any of these before shipping. The community is supportive but a skin that looks great in screenshots and falls apart in actual use will get downloaded and uninstalled quickly.

Step 2: Add screenshots

The community gallery shows screenshots prominently. A skin with no screenshots, no matter how good, will get a fraction of the downloads of a skin with three good screenshots.

Take your screenshots in real working conditions:

Real terminal output, not mock content
The full MOLTamp window, not a cropped terminal
At least one screenshot showing the skin with code, one with terminal output, one with the skin browser visible
PNG or WebP, 2x retina if possible (1440x900 minimum, 2880x1800 ideal)

Screenshots go in your skin folder under screenshots/ — see the skinning guide for the format.

Step 3: Write a real description

The skin description shows up in the gallery card and on the detail page. It is the second-most important factor in whether someone clicks (after the screenshot). Bad descriptions to avoid:

"A dark theme for MOLTamp" (every theme is a dark theme)
"Custom colors and effects" (everyone has these)
"My personal skin" (cool but who is the audience)

Good descriptions tell you what the skin feels like, not what it has. Examples:

"Voight-Kampff terminal. Amber monochrome dossier panels, dithered imagery, threat assessment vibes." (Blade Runner)
"Blood red monochrome. Moon phases. The terminal glows like a dying star." (Lunar)
"Medical HUD. Vital signs. Heartbeat waveform. The terminal is alive." (Biodiagnostic)

Each of those tells you the vibe in 10 words. Aim for that.

Step 4: Tag it

Tags are how people discover skins beyond browsing. The gallery supports up to 5 tags per skin and they are searchable. Use tags that describe:

Aesthetic family: monochrome, minimal, maximalist, retro, cyberpunk, vaporwave, etc.
Color palette: dark, light, warm, cool, neutral
Mood: late-night, focus, calm, energetic, nostalgic
Effects: scanlines, crt, glow, animated

Pick 3-5 tags that someone might actually search for. Avoid filler tags like "skin", "moltamp", "terminal" — those are implied.

Step 5: Export to a zip

In MOLTamp: Settings → Skins → select your skin → Save / Export. Pick "Export as zip." MOLTamp packages your skin folder into a .zip file and lets you choose where to save it.

A few options on the export screen worth checking:

Include layout — bake your current layout (tab assignments, panel sizes, vibes deck) into the skin so installers get your full setup
Include widgets — if your skin requires specific widgets to look right, bundle them
Include visualizers — same idea
Bake font overrides — if you customized the skin's font choices, bake them into the theme.css so installers get the same look

For a minimal "just colors" skin, none of these need to be checked. For a complete vibe with custom widgets and a layout, check what you need.

Step 6: Upload

Go to moltamp.com/community/upload. Sign in with your MOLTamp account (the email + license key combo). Drag your zip file onto the upload area. Add tags. Hit publish.

Within a few seconds your skin is live in the community gallery. You will get a URL like moltamp.com/skins/your-skin-id that you can share.

Step 7: Tell people

The gallery is sortable by newest, popular, top-rated, and updated. New skins get a brief boost in "newest" but most discovery happens via "popular" — which is download-count weighted. Your first downloads come from word of mouth.

Things you can do to help:

Post the URL on Twitter / Mastodon / wherever your developer crowd hangs out
Drop the link in the MOLTamp Discord (we have a #skin-showcase channel)
Submit to Hacker News if your skin has a hook (not "another theme" — something with a story)
Email the URL to friends who use Claude Code

Most successful community skins have one moment of "the right person shared this with the right audience" early on. The gallery does its part after that.

Step 8: Iterate based on feedback

Your skin will get rated and commented on in the gallery. Pay attention. The most valuable feedback is "X looks great except Y is unreadable" — that is exactly what real-use testing missed. Update your skin (Settings → Skins → select your skin → Save / Export → re-upload) and the gallery shows the new version.

The gallery is forgiving about updates. Re-uploading your skin keeps the same URL, the same download count, the same ratings. You can iterate freely.

What about widgets and visualizers

The same process works for widgets (moltamp.com/community/upload?type=widget) and visualizers (moltamp.com/community/upload?type=visualizer). The format is slightly different — widgets have an index.html and a widget.json instead of a CSS file — but the upload flow is identical.

The community standard

A few unwritten rules to keep the community gallery friendly:

Do not upload skins that are 95% copies of someone else's — fork credit matters
Do not stuff your tags with unrelated keywords — tags exist for discovery, not SEO
Do not ship skins with broken effects or unreadable text — test before publishing
Do not name your skins generic words — "Dark Theme" or "Cool Skin" make discovery harder for everyone

The community is good. Be one of the good people in it. Your first skin probably will not get 1000 downloads. The fifth one might. The act of shipping is the entire point.

Now go publish.